A new idea for possible widget: Project Overviewer

[Jianfei Liao]

Ok, the idea of this widget is actually combined with our idea of the countdown clock, the checklist idea from Marcius, and the project visualization idea from prof. Johnson.

 

So this widget is basically a webapp with flash and various stuff inside. On the top there are 4 tabs, each for a different project. When the user click on a tab, it displays the upcoming milestone features of that project, and with the countdown clock showing when the next release going to be. Along with that, that can be some folder-tree like structure for the project, and the user can click on the folders/files to explore the project, and there will be icons representing the developer on the most recent files that has been edited/commited. The possible layout of this widget can be as the following:

 

tab1    tab2     tab3      tab4

 

tab2:                Next milestone:

   feature1                      10 days

   feature2                      5   hours 

   feature3                      20 minutes

   feature4                      11 seconds

 

tab2

   --  folder1

   --  folder2

           --- file1 (fei)

   --  file2 (nathan)

   --  folder3

           --- file3 (nathan)

           --- file4 (fei)

           --- file5

 

The reason that I think this widget is useful is because, it gives the overview of a project in different perspectives: 1. what is the project about? (feature list) 2. when is the project release? (countdown) 3. how is the project look like? (folder tree) 4. what are the developers status on the project? (most recent edited files icons) Even people that is not part of the development team can have a rough idea how well is the project development at the current moment by just looking at this widget.

 

Also, this widget will definitely takes some amout of coding, and the flash code can be also re-used, and we can gather quite a bit of hackystat data by developing this webapp widget.

 

So what do you guys think?

[Fei]

I think what I really wanted to say here is, all these ideas are not
new, this widget is only a combination of several old ideas. But then
when they are together, it seems to me that they are giving out more
meaningful information of the project as a WHOLE, rather than
different individual, separated widgets.

On Feb 12, 12:39 am, "Jianfei Liao" <jianfeil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, the idea of this widget is actually combined with our idea of the
> countdown clock, the checklist idea from Marcius, and the project
> visualization idea from prof. Johnson.
>
> So this widget is basically a webapp with flash and various stuff inside. On
> the top there are 4 tabs, each for a different project. When the user click
> on a tab, it displays the upcoming milestone features of that project, and
> with the countdown clock showing when the next release going to be. Along
> with that, that can be some folder-tree like structure for the project, and
> the user can click on the folders/files to explore the project, and there
> will be icons representing the developer on the most recent files that has
> been edited/commited. The possible layout of this widget can be as the
> following:
>

> tab1    *tab2*     tab3      tab4