Idea mockup - xftasklets

[David Mohr]

Hi everyone,
curiously enough, the name request for comments is implying an already
finished specification, but this email is about an idea I have which
is not yet all fleshed out... So, to combat post release depression
syndrome (tm), I give your brains something to munch on:

Recently I spend way too much time helping my dad, who's a long time
computer user, and to some degree even an advanced user. He wanted a
way to easily resize some digital camera pictures so that he has an
easier time uploading them to the web. It turns out that even though
he started with computers back in the DOS days, he just can't use the
command line by himself. After we were done, I was thinking that there
has to be a way for users like him to perform simple common tasks,
like resizing image files, easily. And I'm sure there are other simple
tasks just like it, that a lot of GUI users would like to perform
without having to go to the command line. Or lazy command line gods,
who don't feel like looking up what kind of switches need to get used
etc.

Smells like the need for a simple framework: xftasklets. Right now
it's essentially a bash library which should help writing and
executing these tasklets in a uniform manner. The same API could be
implemented for other programming languages as well, but I think
initially shell scripting will be enough for a great number of tasks.

Please have a look at:
http://git.xfce.org/squisher/xftasklets/tree/

Checkout your local copy:
git://git.xfce.org/squisher/xftasklets

And let me know what you think!

~David