Bitcoin Forum

Hey Guys,
As some of you might know already, I'm developing the Safebit bitcoin wallet, and one of the major problems that I see my users [including myself!] having issues with is launching the bitcoin client in server/daemon mode.

It seems that for some reason or another this is not a straight forward flow, and somehow the way parameters are passed is not very intuitive even for intermediate users [again, including myself].

I've decide to launch a simple bounty to create a simple, useful, and straight forward bitcoin client launcher. The idea is basically bundle the launcher with the default bitcoin-qt release so that developers and users alike will have an easy way of a) launching the bitcoin app with custom parameters, and b) easily creating shortcuts to those launch parameters so that users can fire up the previously defined configuration in a breeze.

I've designed a simple user interface to accommodate this new launcher tool - the idea of this launcher is to be super simple to understand and configure - these configurations are potentially very dangerous to the users bitcoins, so we need to be careful here and make sure that the users understand the configuration options and don't do something that might harm them.

Here's the design:
https://i.imgur.com/WdP00.png

Right now as you can see it's pretty darn simple - two page, one of which is actually designed at the moment, and very minimal on the options - the other options (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin) could be added latter on.

Here's a basic specification for the launcher:

After clicking "Start Server" the button and all of the configuration fields will become disabled, and the stop server button will become enabled.
Optional: The area where the username/password fields are will disappear once the server is launched, and instead will appear a draggable element that will contain the username, password and port. This draggable element could for example be dragged into the Safebit application, which in it's turn will know what to do with the setting (i.e. configure the application to run with the provided information).

When clicking on the "Create Shortcut" tab a "Save" dialog will appear to save a shortcut to the bitcoin-qt app with the wanted parameters.

The launcher application should check the configuration during "start server" phase to make sure that the configuration actually setup correctly and working properly as expected.

The launcher should run on all 3 major platforms - Linux, Windows, and MacOS and should be identical on all three.

The launcher should follow the Bitcoin-QT coding guidelines [comments, clean code] and eventually should be merged into Bitcoin-QT.

The starting bounty for this project is from myself at 10BTC.

I'll pitch in 2 BTC!

do you guys need that to be in C++ as the bitcoin code currently is in?
I believe that it might be the easiest to just have in in C# using dot net  (shame on me), since it will compile and look the same on those platforms(mono helps a lot here).

I really don't mind at this point how this works or what language it is, as long as it's accepted into the main branch of Bitcoin-QT so that newbies can launch the server with ease.