Hey friends, i want to inform you that i am working on a complete new control tool for Tor. I know some people use Vidalia for it, but i never liked the program and the people i showed vidalia often got confused.
So i started to rewrite it from scratch and i am close to the release of the source code. (Currently i need to clean up some classes in there)
I had a few things on my feature list for the new control tool and i want to share/discuss it with you. Because maybe some of my ideas are bad or maybe you have some additional ideas for features.
A: "native work flow". Thats one of the main goals of my rewrite. The current Vidalia does things a little bit different than people are used to do it. So they get confused, because it does not behave "naturally". So instead of QT i used GTK and followed as always the GNOME HIG. (http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.5/)
B: "Multi configuration setup". What do i mean by that? Well, in my case for example i use Tor on my laptop and i am often in different places where i need different settings for tor. For example, if i am at home i can give tor all the bandwith i have, because at home i don't care. In my company on the other hand i cant do that. I am allowed to run Tor in the company, but with a bandwith limit of 2000kbit/s. (Yes, my company allows this ... well, i am the technical directory, so it was my call :) )
But i need a different Tor configuration there. Or if i am giving a talk and only have mobile internet connections i need every bit of bandwith for checking my emails so i want no server, only Tor client support. Currently i have multiple torrc files for that and always move them arround. That works for command line junkies like me, but even i am anoyed to do this multiple times a day.
So i added the "multi configuration" support into the tool. This allows you to define multiple configurations and simply change them with a click from the gnome2 notification panel.
C: "GUI for config settings". Well, some users are simply not ready to modify config files on there own. So i provide a simple gui (tab based) for all config options i found in the normal torrc file. Always with an explonation (with needs spellchecking, because my spelling sucks in german and is even worse in english :) ) so the user can deside what an option would to.
D: "Notifications": My control tool uses the normal desktop notifications to inform the user about changes in the running tor application. For example if there is a problem building the circuit or something you get the notifyd message and can simply react to events without having the arm log open all the time.
Thats just a quick overview of what i am duing right now. The source code will be released soon and is of course 100% open source. If you have some addiional ideas, feedback, wishes, ... i would like to hear them.
Thanks and greetings Leo
PS: I am Germam and very sorry for every spelling error i did above.