Introducing Nanny
I have created something new in the last few days - although the application is very young, I have been working on the backing components for a much longer time. It is one of those times where a long period of tedious work finally turns into something useful.
Nanny is currently a terminal with a powerful integrated desktop wiki. However, Nanny is also a starting point for creating a powerful workflow application for the GNOME desktop. Let me walk you through some screenshots. At first glance, the main window looks like a terminal:
However, after selecting a workflow…
…something is different. Yay, a wiki-style workflow appeared!
You may edit this workflow in a very simple editor with all the features of a wiki, but none of the pain of wiki markup language. Here is the editor:
Linking to other workflows is easy, and of course you also get to view older revisions. I am particularly proud of the annotation feature, because implementing that properly with all the load/restore magic was a serious pain in the ass.
The future
While Nanny is currently clearly terminal-centric, this is just the beginning. I am planning to gradually make the terminal optional, replacing it by workflows that may kick start other scripts. I will also add more “active” features where you have a workflow with an actual state, and where different wiki pages are combined into one higher-level workflow. In short, this application should evolve into a general purpose workflow application.