DRAFT Guidelines for 3rd-party software

The idea is a lot of software is either obsolete and running only on BeOS ; or weakly ported and using unixish style stuff. We want to avoid that. To help 3rd paty developpers improve their software, here is a list of things to check before releasing an application.

What rules should software follow

• It should work on the latest stable release of Haiku
• It should work on gcc2 hybrid - other flavours of Haiku may be ignored
• configuration files should go in home/config/settings; and the path should be obtained by the appropriate functions & constants, not hardcoded - use find_diretory.
• The app must not write anything to the hard disk except in its own directory (/boot/app/appName, or whatever the user installed it), the configuration directories (home/config/settings, common/), unless the user explicitly asks for it (a save dialog is a good example).

• HIG compliance : it's better if your application fits in the look&feel of the whole system.

Similar documents elsewhere

• Apple App Store Review Guidelines has a checklist we may borrox some entries from.