Saturday, November 29, 2008

Back and More...

Hi again . I have not been blogging for a long time since I have some issues and work to handle.

Recently, I have been planning and starting coding on some Makagiga plugins in an effort to add more useful tools into the Makagiga platform.

What is Makagiga for those who don't know what it is. Makagiga is a desktop platform written in Java. It has a SDK which allows you to create widgets and plugins for it. Simply, it's just a general purpose platform where you install plugins that you want to use.

You can visit Makagiga's official site at http://makagiga.sf.net .

Some plugins I have written is the quickQuit and the login plugin. Login plugin is not offically available for downloads since it is deemed in the testing phase. The quickQuit is simply a quick access quit button to quit Makagiga.

Login plugin for Makagiga still needs a bit more polishing for it's Look and Feel , which otherwise, it can be pretty usable.

Some Makagiga plugins I am currently doing is a Linux-like man page plugin for the Makagiga console so that console man pages can be available. A contact / address book plugin is still under the way in the planning phase and one very difficult and troublesome plugin that have been hard to develop is the encryptfs plugin which essentially encrypts the entire Makagiga filesystem if you switch it on. The difficulty is the portion where I have to handle is how to pull off a one time login on Makagiga where users after logging into Makagiga (have login plugin installed and password already set) don't need to produce another password for encryptfs to decrypt the filesystem for use. I could simply implement another login for the encryptfs but users have to login to Makagiga than the encryptfs again just to use Makagiga. I want the login process to be smooth and hassle-less with a single password so users don't need to remember so many passwords.

Time constraint is another factor to hindering the efforts of development of these plugins and other factors hinder the progress of the development of these plugins.

Enough of my rant now... off I go...