The following are all in development.
It is no secret that I've used various whimsy tools to get a deeper
understanding of various web technologies. The following are three such
technologies that I'm exploring, and what it means to users. All of
these features will be opt-in.
1) Add to Home Page
This allows one to create a 'shortcut' for launching a web page as if it
were a desktop application. This web feature was first designed for
smart phones, but Chrome is the first browser to have alpha support for
this feature on the desktop. Enabling it on the latest chrome requires
you to fiddle with configuration options, but this will be turned on by
default shortly. If support is detected, an 'install' button will
appear at the bottom of the 'help' page. On Macs this will add an icon
to the 'dock'. Launching in this way will work even if the network or
the whimsy server is down, and will even be slightly faster than going
to https://whimsy.apache.org/board/agenda, though I likely will backport
this code to make it work the same when launched from the browser.
2) Notification API
This tool already detects changes and updates pages. I've now added
code which will tell you which agenda items changed if you go to the
'backchannel'. Once that code is stable, I plan to look into using the
notification API to provide 'system' notifications (outside of the
browser) when things change. Users will be able to control which items
they get notification for. For example, they could opt in to seeing
when reports are posted or updated, or to see when comments are left, or
when somebody mentions their userid in the backchannel.
3) Web Push
This will take notifications one step further. These notifications will
be delivered even if the board agenda isn't even loaded.
I have no particular schedule for these items; they likely will be
complete in the fall.
- Sam Ruby
