BOINC Manager goals

Occasionally I’m hit up with the question, “Why doesn’t BOINC Manager expose this feature or that feature?”

Well, quite simply, the goals for BOINC Manager are:

1. Provide a simple interface that works well for controlling BOINC on the local machine.
2. Be cross-platform compatible.

Now a feature that made it in and doesn’t conform to the goals above is the ability to control a remote computer.  We put that in mostly to show off the GUI RPCs and provide ourselves with an easy way to make sure we didn’t take to many liberties with assuming needed files would be local.  An exception would be the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file which is in need of some help to deal with custom ports and the like.

We knew we weren’t going to be able to make everybody happy with just one way to present the UI, and each group of users presented their own challenges.  For instance, somebody new to distributed computing would need to know what the various fields in the UI mean, while old hats would just consider it clutter.

We need to get to the point where we have a tweak-able UI.  Something that can start out being pretty verbose in the beginning, and can be made more spartan in nature when the user doesn’t need as much hand holding.

—– Rom