» Moving forward, Open Source-ward

Moving forward, Open Source-ward

By chris, posted on Apr 14th 2008

OK, cards on the table time. I have very little time with which to work on projectGenie, although I have many ideas I’d like to see happen. While I’ve made some progress with the next version of ‘Genie (“Brookmeyer”) it’s not happening fast enough. I think there’s a market, if that’s the right word, for a system like projectGenie so I’m going to be making it an open source project.

However even that isn’t a two-minute job. I haven’t decided on which project hosting system to use (any recommendations between SourceForge and Google?) although Jon has been extremely helpful. And before it’s opened I’d like to get a framework ready so that developers can build easily on top.

In a nutshell here’s what I want for ‘Genie:

Clean HTML
Multiple themes, selectable from thumbnails (like Wordpress)
Mobile phone version (just task lists, comments and ability to reply)
Simple, unobtrusive JavaScript to handle pane refreshes and AJAXy stuff (using Performer)
Simple time management, with tape-recorder “record, pause, stop” buttons
Better document management, including page of thumbnails for all images attached to a task/project
Simple financial management, including ability to set a price for a task/project and record multiple payments against that price
Plugin system (a bit like Wordpress) so developers can add items to menus to run plugin pages (for reports etc)
Better configuration and user settings management, storing everything in the database

Plus a lot of cleaning up of the interface so projectGenie is even easier to use. It’s a lot to ask, but I hope by opening the source to the good citizens of the web we’ll be able to make something really good and useful for us all.