User:Colin Finck

About me

My name is Colin Finck and I live in Germany. I'm currently one of the ReactOS Release Engineers and also do various other stuff.

I speak German, English and a little bit French.

My Website is at www.ColinFinck.de. You find some ReactOS-related stuff at ReactOS.ColinFinck.de.

If you want to contact me, you can do it at the #reactos and #reactos-german IRC channels or by E-Mail. My E-Mail address can be found here.

ReactOS Profile

myReactOS Account Name:	Colin Finck
IRC Nickname:	Colin_Finck

Ideas for ReactOS / TODO list

Here are some ideas I have for the project. If you want to do something of this, please get in contact with me, so we can discuss this together.

• A web-based system for managing the sub-projects: ReactOS already consists of many sub-projects. Therefore we often have the same questions like "Who is responsible for ...?". Such a system could list the responsible person(s) for each sub-project and also other information like a Task list, related bugs to this project, etc. This would make it easier, especially for newbies, to get to know about all sub-projects and the associated tasks.
• A web-based system for managing ideas like this: Many developers have their own TODO lists. Some list them on the Wiki (like me ;-), but this also does not make it really easier to find them. Maybe some developers also have similar ideas, but no one knows what the other one does. Also ideas can easily get lost if only one person cares about them. An idea management system could list all ideas, so people know where to report new ideas. People can also easily work together on ideas.
• A Website cleanup: At the moment, we have mainly RosCMS and the Wiki for information pages. But there are quite a few problems with them:
  • Some pages exist twice
  • The Wiki is not structured very good and also contains many deprecated pages
  • We have no rule, when we should create a page in RosCMS and when we should create a Wiki page
• Fixing the MediaWiki system:
  • Images aren't displayed at the moment
  • It would be good to have Interwiki pages for languages like Wikipedia has
  • The MediaWiki software could be updated to a newer version
  • The Wiki software is stuck to english locale, also you cannot do any settings in your Wiki Account Preferences
• A central place for documentation: It is hard for newbies to do many things on their own due to the lack of documentation. ThePhysicist's API documentation system is already a step in the right direction. But in my opinion, we also need a central place for other kinds of documentation. The little documentation we have is somewhere on the Wiki, on RosCMS, on the SVN Server, at the responsible people, etc. ---> This is why we need a central place.
  • Maybe a DocBook system like KDE has would be good for guides and other documentation.
• A web-based system for managing artwork: The Design Forum shows that we have so many good artists here, but nothing is organized there. We should have a system for managing artwork, so it is easier to create a consistent design and no works gets lost.
• A new Developer Map based on Google Maps: Our Developer Map is really outdated. It would be nice and quite easy to create such a map with the free Google Maps API. Then we could also include normal ReactOS users on this map. My idea would be the following:
  • Add a new user property to RosCMS, where every user can specify his location. (coordinates)
  • Display the people on the map with the Google Maps API. We can give them different colors to distinguish between users and developers. This distinction can be based on the membership the RosCMS account of each user has.
• More Promotion, so we get more developers: An often discussed point. My ideas would be banners and buttons like they are available on SpreadFirefox for Firefox.
• A Software Database as a base for a better Compatibility Database and a Web-based Package Manager, maybe also a frontend for getting the latest Trunk builds from the Buildserver easily and an easy page for reporting Bootstates/other debug information: These ideas have already been discussed a little bit, but I'm not sure about their state, so I'm just posting them, so they do not get lost.

You have some ideas?

If you have some ideas, which might be related to my ideas, just add them here.

Please don't forget your signature (just add ~~~~ after your idea).

Sub Sections

• My ReactOS Test Computers