[jsword-devel] v1.0.4

[DM Smith]

On Aug 30, 2006, at 3:18 AM, Manfred Bergmann wrote:

> Hi.
>
> Great. The menu is where it should be on the Mac and the App Bundle  
> is great, too.
>
> What is the agenda, where can I help?
>
> By the time I would like to see some other Icons for the Toolbar  
> and for the Mac users a more Mac like Toolbar. This can IMO done by  
> some setProperty() methods. And by the way, how about using the  
> Crystal Clear Icon set:
> http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=25668
>
> Just an Idea. There surely are more important things to do.
> So my question, where can I start and do something. Is it up to me  
> or can you give me a task, DM?

Manfred,
I am really excited that you are joining us!

Take a look at www.crosswire.org/bugs for JSword, Common and  
BibleDesktop to see the list of things to do. If you see things that  
we should do and are not there, add them (you will need to join to do  
that). If you see something you want to do, join and assign yourself  
to it. If it is assigned to someone else and you want to take it,  
send them email and negotiate it with them.

The agenda is rather fluid. I find that passion produces the best  
code. We do what interest us, what others have been clamoring for.  
what needs to be done (e.g. bug fixes) or what is, to us, easy.

Since you have Mac experience how about inventorying the application  
and enumerating the things that should change to make it more Mac  
like. My guess is that we are not too far off.

With regard to the icons, that sounds like a great idea. I suggest  
that we externalize them a bit more. Right now they should be named  
in an "action".properties file. I suggest that we replace the name  
with a symbolic name which can be used to lookup in an icon set. The  
icon set would be represented by a properties file that would match  
the symbolic name with the actual name. If the "symbolic" name from  
the action properties file is not found then it would assume that it  
is a good old reference to an image and use that as it does today.

We have a resource lookup mechanism which allows the user to replace  
pretty much everything, by creating a replacement properties file in  
their ~/Library/Application Support/JSword directory (elsewhere if  
not on the Mac). We created this mechanism so that it would be easy  
to internationalize the application.

With that, we could have different icon sets for KDE, Gnome, Mac,  
Windows and the like, just by delivering different icon sets.  
Additionally, the users can change them as they see fit.

We are using Eclipse for development, but you can use what ever you  
wish. If you are comfortable with XCode that would be fine.

When it comes time to submit changes, create a patch and submit it.  
You can do that by email to this group or you can attach it in Jira.  
Since this is a community effort, we do everything through this list  
or via Jira.

In His Service,
	DM