Re: New faces application & faces monitoring in general

Matt Hughes (hughes@s1.msi.umn.edu)
Fri, 19 Feb 93 15:27:44 CST

According to Boyd:

> what i am saying here is that that i can distinguish between good
> and bad software. i use faces every day, and everyday it's blatant
> that it's core functionality is broken.

I'm somewhat inclined to agree. There is no arguing that a large amount
of time has been spent on this project -- perhaps what is needed is just
a better structure for change. When the person who maintains the software
must spend a large amount of time doing real work, progress stops.

I really like the ideas that have been talked about -- configurable
visual lists of whatever database there is seems to be essentially what we
all want. We just need to generalize it. The faces project should not
be bogged down with hooks into everything, what it should be is a iconic
view of lists - any list. These lists could be created with your basic
generic unix filter type approach. This way someone can concentrate on
writing an application to read any list and find the correct icons, sounds,
etc, and other people can concentrate on little programs to build the
lists -- mail, printer queues, job queues, who's logged into what workstations
on the net, who's on this IRC "frequency," daily tasks of things to get
done, news groups that need reading, attorney general candidates, etc.

I can think of many reasons people don't use this software. We need to
address them.

I've got this feeling like I'm soon to be flamed, but I'm not sure why.
Please respond with constructive critisism, I know I tried to.

I would like to donate my time on making it easier (and therefore portable
and more bug-free) for people to get their images into the various formats.
I'd also like to clean up that area of the documentation.

Any other takers?

--
Matt Hughes    hughes@msi.umn.edu