What Kind of Software Are We Missing?

A year ago, in July 2012, I started a thread on the boards about what software we may still be missing on Pandora. Now, it’s been 12 months. You might be wondering what has changed since then. Good question. Let’s see what has happened since then and whether we are still in need of some special magic… follow me.

Here’s the list from 1 year ago. I have stroke through the applications that were already ported or developed since then, so that you can see for yourself what has been achieved so far.

• Skype equivalent: no luck yet. There’s Qutecom, but unfortunately I cannot get it to work. Anyone had some luck with it?
• Twitter client: I did port some stuff last year but twitter keeps changing their protocol. There are some nice clients for Linux, such as Turpial, but they are not easy to port… Any help here is welcome.
• Facebook client: No progress on that, but you can use it fine in your browser.
• VOIP with crypto: As far as I know we don’t have that.
• Game Maker: Correct me if I’m wrong, but we don’t have an all-purpose GUI-based game maker on Pandora currently.
• Saturn Emulator: There is one in the repo, but it’s slooooow. Don’t expect much improvement there.
• Soft synths: We have Qsynth and JSynthLib but I think that’s not really what the request was about.
• Improved Android: hdonk was working on a new Android version a while ago before giving up, it seems. Not much hope on a new version unless someone picks it up.
• Nice Calendar / Todo application: There’s Makagiga. But it doesn’t sync with online systems. If you have better propositions, let us know in the comments.
• A slideshow program: We have a DVD slideshow maker, if you want to make video slideshows, but more importantly we have geeqie which can act as a slideshow program when you run it into a specific folder.
• Fullscreen music vizualisation: I guess some players do that, but maybe it’s a good time to recompile one of them with libGL from lunixbochs to enable more complex vizualisation scenes.
• BBC B Emulator: We have BeebeM.
• LateX: Done, with the excellent TeXLive and Lyx
• Graphviz: nobody ported it yet. [EDIT: just ported by MarkW after this post!]
• Awesome wm: anyone interested to port this?
• Conkeror: A browser based on xulrunner from Mozilla. Xulrunner is a hell to port, though…
• Dropbox-like application : BittorrentSync does the job nicely.
• Assaultcube: No progress on that one yet. But OpenArena is out!
• EasyRPG: already ported
• DLNA player : check out PLUM !
• More ports of roguelikes: we have Brogue now, it’s great.
• Full office suite: LibreOffice came in a nice PND form not too long ago. Awesome.
• Grooveshark support (in or out of the browser): I need to check with my VPN access if I can make grooveshark work in Firefox at least..
• Spotify support: I may be totally wrong about this but I don’t think we have it… yet.
• GUI for uade: We don’t have one, but it should be really easy to make one. At least a simple one. Anyone up to the task ?
• Bitcoin : Done! Next one…
• DisplayLink support: Now supported since last year.

And that’s about it. As you can see, a LOT has been accomplished and as we say in big corporations, you can give yourselves a round of applause. Still, there are opportunities for developers and porters to fill the existing gaps. There’s still a lot to do, but seeing how we progressed in the past year, I’m tempted to say…

“Nothing is impossible”.

Happy hacking!