Mark has indicated that he's going to be getting back into hijack development once the cold weather sets in. In preparation, I wanted to summarize some of the wishes I've seen flying by over the summer, since I doubt Mark's kept up with the boards much.

These are kinda biased towards userland app interface enhancements, since those are the ones I tend to notice as a wanna-be programmer. If I'm leaving out your favorite wish, please feel free to respond. Just keep in mind that the tendency is to keep as many things out of the kernel as possible unless they can't be implemented as a user application.

Anyway, here's the top 3 wishes I've seen, in no particluar order:

1. Audio device access to 3rd party applications, possibly via the audio overlay patch. (Thread: 1.)

Kim Salo surprisingly released this to the world, and genixia and I have been working out a few kinks in it. I think it's just about Hijack-worthy.

2. Allow background apps to write to the display. (Threads: 1, 2, 3.)

Sounds self-explanatory, but the way to implement it might be non-trivial, given that the current interface requires user apps to block on the WAITMENU ioctl(). There are many apps that could benefit from being able to bind to the Hijack menu, but continue to run in the background and write to a small section of the screen in overlay-mode. Having a little mini GPS window on-screen when gpsapp is backgrounded would be neat, and I've been asked to have my alarm clock program display a little on-screen clock in the corner, independent of the player's info mode and timecode settings. With the way the userland application framework currently works, there's no way to do that.

3. Painless startup of user apps (Thread: 1.)

Preinit and Launcher have made the process of starting apps easier, whether on startup or on demand from the hijack menu. But I don't think they're the ideal solution. Not to take anything away from the efforts of canuckInLA and wfaulk, but Mark's idea sounds simpler. Instead of having launcher do the binding, the kernel could do it directly.

This not only reduces the number of things one has to install, but more importantly, could allow for "instant" application access, where items are always available in Hijack menu, whether they're running or not. Then, one menu selection could bring the application up, and it could either stay backgrounded or exit when the user leaves it. No need to explicitly bring the app up and then go into the menu a second time to select it. Maybe just mark "running" apps with a little icon or something. I think this one would let a lot of people who haven't taken the plunge on preinit and/or launcher run some of the apps more easily. And it'd probably save some RAM too.



So, anyway, I just wanted to collect some of the ideas in one place so we're all reminded of them, and also to give the community a chance to suggest any other wishes. Again, feel free to comment on what you'd like to see.