Witl Plan

The plan is to put together a good computer program named witl (Walk In The Light.) Witl may be written in Java to run on as many different kinds of computers as it can. It may run invisibly to the user the entire time the computer is running. At different random times while witl is running, it will take a picture called a screenschot, of everything being displayed on the monitor at the time. It will then email the screenshot, without delay, to a certain email address which has been specified in advance. Simple, eh?

But we really want it to be a good program. For example, if there are any runtime exceptions which prevent witl from running as ordinarily expected, they should be reported in a log and not just ignored or printed to the (system dependent) standard error stream. For another example, the destination email address should be configured in a configuration file, and witl should provide an easy way for the user to change that configuration (like on the command line when starting an instance of the witl application.)

I don't want witl to require any configurations or remote services to send the outgoing email. Instead, I want to transparently use an smtp server built into witl itself, that will send the email message directly from witl, on the computer on which witl is running. Right now we are leaning and working towards using the aspirin smtp server for this purpose.

We want to take the image from the screen and put it right in the outgoing email message, as an attachment, without ever having to save the screenshot to the hard disk drive as a file. This is for reasons of better performance, less hardware requirements, and really, just to do it the right way, that makes more sense.

Finally, witl is foss, which means, Free and Open Source Software. It is legally built and used under the lgpl, the Lesser General Public License. Everyone in the world is encouraged to plan, program, build, and improve, witl. The project is hosted on sf.net (SourceForge,) where sf.net users may easily join and modify the codebase.

People interested in previewing, testing, using, planning, programming, or taking advantage of being involved in witl in any way, or even people that are just curious, are invited to join and chat in the witl discussion group. Or, if it would make you more comfortable, you could always email 1 of the witl admins, isAAc4given or Teknohazard. Please join today!