View Development tasks
This is a place to store information on Spaz development tasks.
- If you are interested in helping with Spaz development, introduce yourself on the [spaz-users group](http://groups.google.com/group/spaz-users) and let us know how you can help!
- If you have an idea for a new development task, post it on the [spaz-users group](http://groups.google.com/group/spaz-users) so we can talk about it before adding it, please.
Thanks!
##Switchable Sound Sets
Lead: Kibitzer
Implement switchable sound sets, much as switchable themes already exist. It requires:
- addition to the prefs, displaying a list of soundsets;
- a little rework on the sound code so it loads sounds from the selected set;
- a place to store both distributed and user-created soundsets (i.e. the program dir and the app data store).
##Spellchecking
Lead: Kibitzer
To do the inline marking of misspellings will require a switch to some kind of “rich” editor, and I dunno how well that will work. Another possibility would be to use a SWF textbox there, but that would move us outside pure HTML/JS, and I’m not super about that. -funkatron
That’s cool, but I’m not sure a rich editor is required. (caveat: i might be talking thru my arse here, need to investigate further.) There are potential problems because the way I’m thinking of doing it requires a service like Google Spell (which I believe is no longer available) or Yahoo Spell, or a link to a backend pspell page — potentially significant extra traffic. What I hope to do is present this as a PoC for evaluation, rather than a finished feature. As an aside, could be a good first plugin using the proposed plugin architecture.
Maybe some kind of local instance of [Aspell](http://aspell.net/) might be useful in this case – though I have no idea on implementation. Not to pick nits, but it looks like pspell hasn’t been updated since 2001. – cspruck (above paragraph not mine)
- Theme Examples
Lead: Kibitzer
Create a wiki page outlining how to make themes. A (possibly) simple one to start would be to use the default them but move the entry box to the top of the page.
- Custom keyboard shortcuts
Lead: thynctank
At least set up a user-editable config file that lets a user remap keyboard shortcuts – funkatron
Currently this is implemented in preferences.json. Will work on adding prefs interface when the data is agreed upon, etc.
- Notification popup positioning
Lead:
This is really just an issue of making a pref and a UI for the pref — the code already supports setting which corner notifications appear in. – funkatron
- Friends network “map”
Lead:
A cool idea to show relationships between friends of yours. Would require a fair bit of work on the rendering side, though. Data retrieval might be limited because of API limits. Requires further investigation – funkatron
Upon reading this description, I thought of [TweetWheel](http://www.tweetwheel.com/), but we might want to rethink the implementation, as it could get pretty unwieldy within Spaz (unless we just did something like triggering that URL in a browser and passing your username to it). I haven’t looked at the source yet, though. As it is, it took me several refreshes to get it to process and render (due to Twitter-lag, I imagine) and I only have 26 people at the moment – who knows what it does with 100+ followees – cspruck
- Plugins system
Lead: Funkatron
A [proof of concept](http://groups.google.com/group/spaz-users/browse_thread/thread/d00457d2f6ffa969/0024b0cce14f6bff) has already been developed for this. Initially the only plugin hook would be for processing tweets (things like linking hashtags come to mind).
- URL-shortening service switcher
Lead:
The URL-shortening service stuff in Spaz is actually very modular. Although currently only Snipr can be used, the code for tinyURL still exists, and the two can be swapped very easily. Realistically there’s only a preference UI to be created, and a little code to read all the possible engines, that is needed.
kibitzer — request from user group for “http://ri.ms/”
- “Mute” user
Lead: kibitzer
I’d find it useful to temporarily block a user’s updates — “mute” them. For example, some ppl when attending a conference constantly tweet updates, tagged for the conference. For myself, I generally am uninterested in such stuff — it just clutters my timeline.
More refined version: block tweets with tags, such as #wds08
- Have Shorten Window Auto-Close
Lead: kibitzer
Allow for the link shorten window to auto-close after invoking, if there’s something in the clipboard.
- closing countdown starts as soon as the short URL is placed in the clipboard
- a checkbox to control auto-closing (so it can be turned off if you want to process a bunch.
- The ability to cancel the close countdown
- Prefs/Debug command-line setting
Lead: kibitzer
Sometimes people need to reset their prefs, or manually turn on debug if Spaz is invisible. (a) is it possible to pass command-line paramaters to spaz (AIR)? (b) if so, provide two params: “resetprefs” and “debug on|off”.