[Fenfire-dev] The Fenfire demo

[Benja Fallenstein]

Hi,

On the weekend, the "Fenfire demo" (i.e., the first implementation of
the 'real' Fenfire interface) has made small but quite significant
progress. :-) For the first time, we have an (incomplete) canvas view
and an (incomplete) structure view working together :-)

The canvas view actually was very little work after we've laid the
right foundations; I spent most of the weekend fixing speedbugs.

Anyway, the question is now how to go on. What I would like to have is
a demo that actually shows some practical use(s) for Fenfire, for the
first time really showing the integration between different applitudes
through buoys and the structure. The current demo is exciting to
Fenfire geeks, but it doesn't suffice to show the Fenfire vision to
other people. ;-) So what's missing?

- Better structure view (what we discussed with Janne)
- Structure editing
- Mainview sizing (the spatial context having the focus should be shown large)
- Show buoys for other nodes in a spatial context than the selected node
- Mouse (i.e., clicking to move through the structure)
- Getting events through to the spatial views, so that we can pan
canvases, create new nodes on canvases, etc. (text editing should
probably also be done that way)
- Some other spatial views -- what should they be? I suppose calendar
& spiral? (It would be good to have two different 'special views' for
a single type, so that we can show switching.) Also a more traditional
list of e-mails, I think.
- A spatial view for "documents," i.e., for longer notes.
- Gnowsis integration -- download e-mails from Thunderbird
- Maybe FenFeed integration, but that is not so urgent -- can do that
a little later
- A demo space using the different things above for a demo showing
Fenfire doing something useful -- probably the "PIM thing" (personal
information management: notes, appointments, TODO, e-mails, people,
addresses, birthdays, ...)
- I think mudyc will also want the fancy view-changing thing where the
different spatial contexts of a thing are shown at the bottom of the
screen and the user can change the view by clicking.

This seems a lot but some of these are really easy, although some may
be quite difficult.

I'll be off-line for two days, travelling to Germany, so we need to
split up the work during that time. Here's what I would like to work
on:

- Structure editing
- Better structure view
- Gnowsis integration
- Showing buoys to non-focused nodes in spatial contexts
- Mainview sizing

If I have time:
- e-mail list view
- spatial "document" view
- spiral view 
- demo space

Mudyc, if you like you could look at these:

- Mouse (i.e., clicking to move through the structure)
- Getting events through to the spatial views, canvas panning etc.
- Calendar views

What do you think?

- Benja