With both Phoenix and the MDC collecting new members, and their involvement with the platform, I thought this would be a great time to ask you, the users and testers, what kind of light to mid sized development projects you would like to see undertaken? What kind of projects, that would fit a third party or open source, would you like to see?

I don't mean anything as heavy hitting as a browser, but short projects to inspire the developers? Sometimes a developer needs something to spur the imagination, so what would intrest everyone?

Here are some ideas that I've had:

A Cookbook d/b with pictures.

An old style WB hack for Ambient (who all remembers the Lemmings falling off of the WB windows, or the christmas lights?)

ARexx Asker (a gui that can extract the ARexx commands from any running application)

A NewsTicker (think of the old newsticker from amigacentral R.I.P.)

Really, there are likely hundreds of little useful things that can be done, so how about it? Throw up some ideas? I know the usual banter is for the bigger projects, such as an IDE or a better browser, but what about the smaller projects? Ideas?

Well thats easy ....

First port OpenOffice, and than use the coffeebreak to create
MoM (Mac_on_MorphOS)

Ok. ok. don't hit me .....

Something really small I could use would be some autobackup-tool,
that would copy some marked files into a drawer named after the day.

Should be working on either Tooltypes or a config-file (that contains
the file-list and maybe the destination path).

Think this would even be possible with some shell-scripting.

A nice Tetris
Something similar to the old 'Tetrix'
which was on a cover disk of germans
amiga plus iirc ...

i know it was jokingly brought up but i think someone should port mac on linux (or make a mom "mac on morph") that would be really cool. but i think we need to see more filesharing software.

>I know the usual banter is for the bigger
>projects, such as an IDE or a better browser

Well I wish there'd be, otherwise you'd have a beta version of an IDE by the end of the year and I wouldn't need to switch to another system to have an IDE and get rid of the makefile quack ...

>Well I wish there'd be, otherwise...

Oh, please do not misunderstand me. The IDE is very important, and MorphED with the SDK is likely just the first step in that direction. However, I was alluding to the need to help old programmers get up to speed, new programmers to learn the system, and things to give the hardcore programmers something to do on the side (you know, confidence boosters).

That is why I started this thread. Yes, we need an IDE; however, wouldn't you rather see a coder work on something productive while he/she becomes familiar enough with the system to actually help work on an IDE?

Something like the navis in the anime Lain would be cool. A simplifyed version could be easily made (some wav files, anims) for the user login experience, or if someone dares to take the more challenging way, participate in LainOS and port it to Pegasos when ready

>>Well I wish there'd be, otherwise...
>
>Oh, please do not misunderstand me.

I think you misunderstood :)

I had been working on an IDE for some time because I felt it sorely missing - at first for AmigaOS 4, then after the November 1st desaster rewrote everything for MorphOS.

I had asked here a long time ago (the forum message is gone already) if anybody would be interested in an IDE for MorphOS, and the result was something around "we don't need such a silly thing".

So I dumped the project because it was much too ambitious to code it just for me alone. Given the total desinterest in such a thing, I was wondering why this ever pops up again, first in bbrv's "mega bundle list", then here ...

Anyway, it's correct new developers should first try something smaller. I have no special projects in mind, but if people picking up a project want to produce something of lasting value they should make sure to at least ...

- use C++, doing proper OOP
- use generic programming, abstract as much as you can
- look at other OOP languages also, for example at Sather to get a feeling for when to use C++'s inheritance and when not.
- don't just use the next-best algorithms but do your math

And a lot more which I'm too lazy to type in now.

Hmm. Sorry if I misunderstood, tomjoad, but I don't think that I ever stood against a dev package that could make programming easier. Like you just said, it would be a larger than one man project.

Tomjoad, have you joined the MDC yet? I'm sure that an IDE would be best developed through the MDC.

Any ideas for some "easy" programs to develop for MorphOS though?