Future plans

[Animal]

Any chance of some kind of roadmap Jack?

I'd like to advance some of the ideas that I've thrown around as suggestions/feature requests, but I don't want to waste my time by writing something totally homespun to find you have a great design in mind, and produce it!

I was wondering what the TaskBar will be?

The more I think about how I'll be using the YUI and yui-ext classes in my application, and how my bosses want it to look and feel, the more I realize that it will be desktop-like.

I've been looking at TIBCO since it was on Ajaxian earlier today, and while it doesn't look good, the maximizable, minimizable windows are an excellent concept.

I'm considering extending the Toolbar class to accomodate special instances of ToolbarButtons which are attached to BasicDialogs. BasicDialogs could be registered with an instance of Toolbar, and have a button appear to represent them. Is this the kind of thing the TaskBar is planned to be?

I also very much like this idea of "undocking" ContentPanels from their Regions into BasicDialogs which can be then moved around, resized and possibly minimized into the Region's tool area. I can work on that in my spare time.

[jbowman]

A tool bar turned into a task bar shouldn't be too hard, the buttons would basically just be set to call functions like myDialog.show(this);

[zquirm]

actually...it would be great to see a roadmap in print...either in the forum or a link on your blog. Is there any way you could post and continue to update the lists of what's coming in .33 and .34 etc?

I would love to be able to always see what's yet to come.

[jack.slocum]

Animal, the full desktop like UI is something I have thought about but right now it's priority isn't very high. The main reason is so few people have requested it and it is a lot of work. Obviously if someone decided to sponsored it that would be a different story.

Zquirm, that really is the main reason I haven't published any kind of roadmap. For one, it takes longer to make roadmaps than to develop code (at least for me, hehe). But the primary reason is I am hoping that soon, development can be partially driven by some kind of sponsorship or donations. If someone is willing to pay for X feature, it would obviously be top priority and my roadmap would be shot. I think of a roadmap as a promise and I don't like to make promises that I might not be able to keep.

Animal, the TaskPanel I was thinking about making is a panel similar to my documents/windows explorer (when folders isn't visible) with the collapsing regions of links for actions on the side.

[thesilentman]

I'd just like to follow up on the taskbar thing.
Is there going to be development in that direction anytime soon?

[brian.moeskau]

Let me look into the Magic 8-Ball...

"All signs point to Yes"

[jay@moduscreate.com]

i'd like to see tutorials built into the doc base. any chance of that happening?

[JasonMichael]

I'm with Animal in hoping that js-ext will evolve to being able to be a full desktop like UI. I think in time, we'll all need to bring it to this type of functionality to be competitive with all the other commercial and private-not-for-sale products offering this. I would love to see the panels be detachable into dialogs that can be dragged around the screen. I still hope to be able to create a nice calendar widget that looks like Outlook's calendar GUI, but be able to drag-and-drop blocks of time, without needing to type them in start/end times.

Jason

[thesilentman]

Yep, count me in on that, too.

[jay@moduscreate.com]

Also, i'd like to see it evolve and divorce itself from other frameworks.