User:Tangotango/GDWikiWatch

Screenshot of alpha version

GDWikiWatch is a Google Desktop sidebar plug-in. It displays your Wikipedia watchlist in the Google sidebar, in a format just like any other sidebar plug-in. It's still in its early stages, but I plan to finish it and release it in the near future.

In the end it will be open source; however, I can't release it, let alone open-source it, at the moment because my Wikipedia username and password are hardcoded in the program ;)

I have been careful with the load it imposes on the Wikimedia servers. It makes two requests to login (at startup), and one request for each time it updates. (every 3 mins).

I know it's sort of silly to request comments before the thing's available, but I would like to solicit constructive comments regarding the program (e.g., whether you would use it, and if so, how), and I'll implement as many of those as possible.

Please post comments to the talk page. Thank you!

By the way, it was programmed in Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, using the Google Desktop SDK.

Current features

• Shows your watchlist
• Double-clicking on a tile will open the diff
• Single-clicking on a tile will open a details panel, which shows the edit comment and edited section (if appropriate). Clicking on the header of this panel will do the same thing as above.

To-do

• Thread the downloading part (login part is already threaded) so as to improve responsiveness
• Give it a proper user-agent
• Handle errors more gracefully
  • Login: Check timeout, catch WebExceptions
  • Watchlist retrieval: Catch WebExceptions
  • Login: Let user try logging in again by clicking panel header on error tile
  • Watchlist retrieval: On fail, display only one error. Stop at three errors, allow user to manually restart.
  • Handle other current-MessageBox errors
• Load username/password from configuration
• Create the configuration dialog
• Make compatible with the "enhanced" watched list
• Make cookies persistent over sessions
• Localise interface
• Make compatible with other wikis
  • Specifically, other language wikis. Is already compatible with other English MediaWikis.

System Requirements

• Google Desktop (tested with v3, not sure about other versions)
• Microsoft .NET Framework runtime version 2
• Any version of Windows that runs the software above