Welcome - About Mayanna

[einalex]

Welcome to Mayanna!

My name is Alexander Gabriel and I welcome you all to our take on a
modern desktop. I will be maintaining your safety on this young
journey but before I come to what will be, let me fist say a few
things about what we are and where this project has it's roots.

The core devs of this project have met some time ago while hacking at
the Gimmie dock. In this time it became clear to us, that although
Gimmie is a good take on modern computing and apart from a few bugs
pretty good at it's job our view on the modern desktop is a bit
broader - more about that later. We tried to give Gimmie the ability
to grow by implementing a plugin system but while doing that we came
across a few problems and limitations. These made it clear to us that
to implement our vision it would be more efficient to build from
ground up to it instead of pushing and breaking the good Gimmie to our
desired form. In addition to that Gimmie maintainer Alex Graveley got
very busy and decided to freeze Gimmie. So we forked and left with
Alex Graveleys best wishes.

Thus Mayanna was born and with it we strive to take it even further.
Gimmie was about putting all your information at your fingertips - and
so is Mayanna. But we won't stop there. We want to give you a
plattform for your daily computing. One that fits in your desktop
design and in your way of work.

I will try to give you an overview of our planned features and ideas
as of now.

We want to seperate the datastructure from the GUI and give you the
ability to create your own or use and modify others'. We will let you
decide what info you want to see, we will let you decide how you want
to see it, we will let you decide when you want to see it. And we will
try to guess what you are doing and provide you with options that
might interest you in that context. We will let you combine pieces of
information to topics to save and resume your work on them easily. we
will do all that on your computer without sending your personal
information around the web. And we will let you share your ideas and
your data easily with groups or single persons. To get all that
working, Mayanna will interact with a lot of the tools and services
you use today and integrate data from a lot of different sources.
Additionally we will do our part in creating the 'Super Data Daemon
Thing' (http://live.gnome.org/SuperDataDaemonThing).

That is the vision as of today, a vision that, if it becomes reality
and you decide to join the ride, will revolutionize the way you work
with your computer. If it becomes a reality. With that thought let's
come back to the present. We are currently brainstorming and creating
a lot of UML diagrams to get the basic framework layed out. When that
process has matured a bit we will post these diagrams and with you
help hopefully get the last quirks out of them. We will then start to
hack - using Gimmie's code where that is possible. And again we will
need your help. Gimmie suffered a lot under the lack of developpers
working on it. To make our vision real we need manpower. We need YOU.
We welcome anyone interested in submitting patches or reporting bugs,
suggesting, designing, creating GUIs, writing dataproviders, or simply
running our software and telling us where we might do better.
We will try to create easy to use and clean yet powerful APIs and we
will make it a priority to document our code, making it as easy as
possible to join the project at every stage.

Mayanna will feature a plugin system, in fact everything apart from
it's core will be a plugin. That will make development even outside
the main team possible and furthermore enable users to chose between a
number of ways to accomplish a task or view a result - or even create
there own way. It will enable Mayanna to be exactly as everyone of you
need it. It will also - and that is a major point - enable Mayanna to
interact with any number of new or old web services or applications or
daemons.

The process of making Mayanna a reality will take some effort and
time. And while we work on that, we don't want to leave you all out in
the rain. Seif Lotfy volunteered to keep working on the codebase we
took with us from Gimmie which will be known as Mayanna-legacy. The
new Mayanna will be created beside Mayanna-legacy, using the knowledge
we gained working on it and any code that comes in handy.

By now you know what this is and where we're planing to take it. You
all are very welcome to join the ride, start contributing ideas or
patches, subscribe to the mailing list, keep us in your bookmarks or
even just in your minds.

Alex Gabriel