Infogreater

Quick note before I talk about my new project: I'm going to be hacking on twisted.names' client APIs soon. Users will soon have much better timeout support. Hooray for paid open-source hacking ;-)

One of the "secret" projects I mentioned a few posts back just became *barely* usable. I'm calling it "Infogreater" right now, but I'll probably change that. Anyway, *currently* it's a clone of the excellent mind-mapping software Freemind, and it just passes at that. The eventual goal is to make it extensible and programmable -- Freemind itself is just a (pretty primitive) hierarchical database. I'm going to add new node types other than just "simple text box" that can hold richer data -- links to other nodes, source code to be executed, etc.

I'm a programmer, so most of my ideas for it now are only really useful for programmers. Here are some of my ideas:

* A node that lists all of your bugs from a Roundup bug tracker.

* A node that allows you to view and edit entries in a simple text-format TODO file (I have a number of projects that are too small to have real bug trackers, and I use TODO files in them).

* A node that shows you the subjects and senders of messages in your inbox.

* Filesystem browser

The idea here is to show you information that's relevant to you, but not to do everything itself. The various nodes will give links that will open applications/web browsers to actually view details and do whatever application-specific stuff.

I have many more ideas for *really* crazy applications of this, but none that I want to talk about yet. ;-)

The code is available, but only via a Subversion repository now. There's information on my Code page.

I owe this idea to Robert Church.