Crawling out from under the work...

The last week or so has been spent in manic hacking. Recently I wrote about my GNOME 2 applet that listens to a mobile phone for incoming text messages. Well, I wanted a decent UI for hooking it up to Bluetooth controlled phones.

This led me into writing a Bluetooth device subsystem for GNOME. Basically it's a Bonobo component that knows about the Bluetooth devices available to the computer, and brokers interrogation of this database to applications. It can also set up serial port connections to Bluetooth devices for clients.

Everything's in its early stages. For instance, the manager component needs a prefs app written for it so users can look at Bluetooth devices from the control center. The Phone Manager applet itself needs a lot of polish and user-friendliness added.

Once it's a bit more mature (read: I know it'll compile and run for someone else but me), my intent is to see if the GNOME project at large wants this work. It'd certainly be very cool to have the GNOME desktop have as easy control over Bluetooth devices as, say, Mac OS X does.

Oh, and everyone loves a screenshot.

And now, a call for victims. I'm looking for people who run GNOME 2, have a Bluetooth-enabled cellphone and a Bluetooth dongle. Also those with an IR or serial cable connection to their cellphone, too, but the fun's not as great for you :) Also, for now, you need to be happy with compiling the program from source. If you meet all these requirements, and are interested, drop me a mail to edd at usefulinc dot com or find me on irc.gnome.org/#gnome, nick 'edd'. IRC's probably going to be a must in the early days.