Wirestorm

Our choice of platform for MixIndex was .NET/C# since it was, at the time, going to be tightly integrated and specific to the Windows OS. However, with the pace of development of Mono and PortableDotNet over the last couple of years, most of the app will now run on any platform. Two key components, however, do not.

First, is the streaming audio library, DirectX is used on windows, but since this is quite well abstracted, it could be rewritten on a per-platform basis, not the best solution, but it is doable.

Second, however, is the UI, System.Windows.Forms is an ugly beast, and not supported very well by either of the two open-source dotnet runtimes, so a choice needs to be made.

After looking at WX.NET, a .NET implmentation of WX widgets, and GTK#, GTK+ bindings for .NET, I was begining to get dishartened by the hackish way they were all implemented. GTK# is just ugly on all platforms, rather than looking good on one or two. WX uses the native interface, but there are no decent, free/cheap, tools to help you, the ones that do are so clunky, they make me worried as to how the rest of the system is imlpemented. All in all, very underwhelming.

Anyway, I am now looking at XUL and its damn nice, clean, standards complient, cross platform and open-source. The XUL Runner is a standalone application for running XUL apps, which would be packaged into the apps installer, and then the XUL part can communicate with the ‘real’ application over SOAP, XML RPC, or whatever, enforcing a strict seperation of UI and Application. Stuff like localization is done through entities defined in DTDs, and styling is done through css, very very cool.

This is the tutorial I followed.

Just a thought, wouldn’t it be nice if you could agregate rss feeds for events, and filter by location. Therefore, when I’m in Seattle in January, I could instantly see whats going down in the area, and when i return to the UK, I would then again see details for events in the London area.

Its quite interesting that the marketing world is begining to pick up on this, I for one would quite like an RSS feed from ticketmaster, say, complete with community tagging, so i could just get a feed of stuff I’m interested, based on my current location. The transition from being an irritating, ever-present, lowest-common-denominator-targeted, to useful, informative, open and transparent will make the early adopting marketing firms very very rich, they just need to become the first point of contact for such things.

No doubt, this will be Google; “Tell us your events on google base, and people can search based on their current location!”… Oh wait, isn’t this already possible?