upcoming board agenda updates

[Sam Ruby <ru...@intertwingly.net>]

The following are all in development.

It is no secret that I've used various whimsy tools to get a deeper 
understanding of various web technologies.  The following are three such 
technologies that I'm exploring, and what it means to users.  All of 
these features will be opt-in.


1) Add to Home Page

This allows one to create a 'shortcut' for launching a web page as if it 
were a desktop application.  This web feature was first designed for 
smart phones, but Chrome is the first browser to have alpha support for 
this feature on the desktop.  Enabling it on the latest chrome requires 
you to fiddle with configuration options, but this will be turned on by 
default shortly.  If support is detected, an 'install' button will 
appear at the bottom of the 'help' page.  On Macs this will add an icon 
to the 'dock'. Launching in this way will work even if the network or 
the whimsy server is down, and will even be slightly faster than going 
to https://whimsy.apache.org/board/agenda, though I likely will backport 
this code to make it work the same when launched from the browser.


2)  Notification API

This tool already detects changes and updates pages.  I've now added 
code which will tell you which agenda items changed if you go to the 
'backchannel'.  Once that code is stable, I plan to look into using the 
notification API to provide 'system' notifications (outside of the 
browser) when things change.  Users will be able to control which items 
they get notification for.  For example, they could opt in to seeing 
when reports are posted or updated, or to see when comments are left, or 
when somebody mentions their userid in the backchannel.


3) Web Push

This will take notifications one step further.  These notifications will 
be delivered even if the board agenda isn't even loaded.


I have no particular schedule for these items; they likely will be 
complete in the fall.


- Sam Ruby