A few crazy ideas

I've been working on a bunch of things to make something that could 
arguably called a distro, (although that's not really what I'm going for).

I have looked at various things I would like to add.  

Some of them are not so much essential to ROX as things that could be 
done with the least amount of overhead if they were attached to a pre-
existing program.

I have trialed a number of desktop widget systems,  I'm not sure if they 
are far more powerful than the common use case needs or whether they are 
hideously bloated.

For the most part the widgets are static or very slow updating.  I have 
considered adding simple support to ROX-Filer to allow named Images on 
the pinboard.  Like icons but any size and not a program launcher.

You could theoretically do most widget things there with a cron job. A 
cunning trick for more interactive things while enforcing minimum light 
weight is to have a virtual machine with a very simple architecture.

  * One Image for RGBA source images
  * One Image for BW / Greyscale source images (glyphs etc.) 
  * Abitity to call shell commands with stdin and stdout communication.
  * Abitity to construct onscreen image by blitting bits of source images.
  * ATMEL AVR microcontroller instruction set.  

The Microcontroller may seem an odd choice, but it certainly has the 
capacity to do everything that should go into a widget.  Widget logic 
itself should be very small.  You can enforce ram usage as low as 4k (64k 
should be an extravagant amount for this sort of thing) 

An emulator exists already for the AVR, as a standalone executable it 
weighs in at 38k.  integrated into ROX-Filer it would probably have lower 
overhead.

I think all of this is in my range of ability, so I'll dive in once I've 
done with my current stuff.

Something else I have considered.  Storing MetaData in directories.
PNG files are a tagged format.  the .DirIcon has the ability to store 
extra data without breaking the PNG format.  

There are all sorts of things that could have per directory attributes 
but an idea that appeals is having the ability to add rules for Copying/
renaming etc. 
  
Some ideas:
  enforce symlinks,  for a directory of personal icon theme that doesn't 
take copies maybe
  Add an item to the (copy, move, link (relative), link (absolute)) for, 
say 'convert to jpeg') 

It's a user interface thing so quite subjective,  I'm not so much 
advocating it as putting it out there for discussion.

Having directory rules would mean you'd add another button to the icon 
panel of ROX-Filer to toggle rules active/inactive.  Could be a thing.
might not be.







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