DoctorMo's Blog

Today there has been a lot of talk about common functionality that attempts to replace lots of existing replicated functionality.

When you have a problem that everyone has to solve, it’s worth considering making a standard version available which all programmers can take advantage of. For instance, every program can take advantage of files, files are so important that they usually form a core part of many programming languages. But could you imagine a system where each program writes data to the disk in it’s own way?

Common Printing Interface

The Linux Foundation is working on a common printing interface which allows all programs to utilise this single and may I saw awesome interface.  One that will hopefully be used via dbus (most things are going this way) by all applications that want to print, this will move printing up a step in design and coherence.

Common Contacts Data Store

The Canonical Online Services team appear to be heading up a move towards having a local content database using CouchDB. In this they would like to store contacts and discussions today were around all the considerations of the system. Obviously there are already lots of projects attempting to solve these set of problems, some on KDE and some on Gnome; but the hope is that this system will be a unified way of talking to the system of contacts and hopefully reproduce the ease of intergration and functionality available in the Apple system.

The big functionality improvements other than common access to data will be the ability to share your contacts over the online services.

I expect (although I’m being totally speculative) that if the contacts development is successful that the system will be expanded to include other databases. I’d like to see meta data, calendar and note systems being brought into a shared infrastructural system.

Thoughts?