# ideas



## iRock (Jan 18, 2001)

so i'm looking for a project to work on for os x.  Anyone have any ideas?  Right now i'm planning on writing some stuff to go with the palm desktop, and i'm probably going to look through the source for fire and see what i can do with it.  While that is all grand, I'd like to do something of my own that a lot of people would find useful.  So, if you have any ideas, let them be heard


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## endian (Jan 18, 2001)

one idea i had last night while reading the Aqua HIG:

They recommend using a 3D modelling program to make icons! I'm supposed to spend thousands of dollars on Maya just so my apps can have niftily rendered icons?

A simple renderer with a prebuild library of objects commonly used in icons (pen, globe, magnifying glass, etc) would be great.

I don't know anything about 3D graphics though, so it's someone elses job


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## clark (Jan 20, 2001)

You can write a application simular to xkill. that would be cool.


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## strobe (Jan 21, 2001)

Why have xkill when you already have the force quit key combo?


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## clark (Jan 21, 2001)

becuase its cool =)


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## parallax (Jan 21, 2001)

I've always wanted to write a Terminal which sports skins and selective transparency... That would rock


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## Vroomfondel (Jan 21, 2001)

> I've always wanted to write a Terminal which sports skins and selective
> transparency...

Just don't forget audio hooks so I can have authentic key clicks and fleeps
with a VT52 skin.


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## zpincus (Jan 21, 2001)

Well strobe thinks this is an idiot idea, but I really would like to see a VNC Server for quartz. This probably entais finding a way to get at the quartz framebuffer, then porting code. So probably not a terribly interesting project, unless you're totally into VNC.

And here are some ideas for programs that would extend the interface and make it better:

A pipe dream I have would be for someone to reimplement windowshade. You would be a hero for doing this (but Apple may beat you to it in OS X Final -- who knows?) 

garlic_b wants a way to have animated desktop pictures a la XEarth -- which would be fun, but not 100% useful.

Having a little background process that monitors for classic symptoms of "hung UI" (like TruBluEnvironment taking 95% of system resources for more than a minute, etc) and then forces a dialog to the front asking if you want to kill the offending process would be cool, though probablly a pain to get completely working. But this would be nice for people who don't have the option to telnet/SSH into their "frozen" boxes to fix things. Or perhaps a background applicaion that waits for a key combination and then forces a super-high-priority terminal window, or process viewer to the front so it is easy to fix things. (Sort of like command-option-escape, but actually useful because you can kill more than just running applications.) But this all relies on being able to forcibly draw things to the screen, which may not be easy.

So if any of these jumps out at you, I think they might be cool additions to the interface.

Zach


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