Roadmap
Introduction
Kipinä project was started in 2002. In the beginning, I wasn't sure what kind of program Kipinä should be. When I started the project, I wrote some code in Perl, but I quickly understood that wasn't what I wanted. So, after that I wrote some code in Java, but I still didn't really know what I was doing.
But then, in May 2003, I thought it would be nice to write Kipinä in C to have GUI using GTK+ as I was using many GTK+ applications already. (Well, to be honest, I first coded in C as CLI application but that didn't feel the right decision.)
There was just one big problem with coding Kipinä in C: I didn't know any C at that time :-) Fortunately, I did know basics about programming, so it didn't took so long to have some basic skills in C. After that, only learning to use GTK+ APIs was really painful at the beginning.
Development
At the moment, all the code in Kipinä is written by me. That is, a bit over 20 000 lines of C code (raw wc -l).
I have the CVS repository in my own computer without public access to it. Although I have written all the code myself, there have been many suggestions by others.
In the future, all the help would be appreciated. There are many things which need to be done, like translations, documentation etc.
The current state of the project
At this time, Kipinä is in version 0.0.9. That means, it is not really stable enough to real use. (I'm using it myself without problems though.)
Achieved goals
- Basic functionality as I see it, is implemented in current version of Kipinä. That means, it is perfectly usable for me at least.
Problems
- Plugins are not usable yet. That simply means that there are not any plugins which would do something useful.
- Some parts of Kipinä are really slow.
- Year View in the calendar is really slow AND it needs some fresh ideas in the future.
The future
Next six months
There won't be much development in the next six months, because I'll go to the army 12th July. But after that I would like to see Kipinä project to evolve faster again.
1.0
Before reaching the version number 1.0 Kipinä must be real alternative to all equivalent commercial programs. Much work needs to be done before that but I the day will come.
Other things
- It would be possible to use GNOME APIs more in the future. Currently Kipinä uses only GTK+ and libglade and that model has its pros and cons. Using at least GConf is a strong alternative.
- As I would like to make Kipinä a real alternative to commercial programs it could be nice to be able to import data from some other file formats.
- Some way to directly print some reports and charts would be nice.
Ville Kangas <ville at mirjami dot net>