Re: n00b in town

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

> Hello Fyodor,
>
> I was referred to the nmap Summer of Code site from Google's list. I
> have always been fascinated by network security and an opportunity to
> participate on nmap would be extremely attractive.
>
> Zenmap and mobile nmap looked particularly interesting to me. 
> I have been doing commercial applications GUI in win32 to earn rent,
> making PyQt applications for fun and studying human computer
> interaction and interface design for the duration of my university
> study. I've also been using nmap and discovered Zenmap on my first
> year of university. Superficially, I believe some of the easiest
> improvements to make immediately are minor usability flaws. Currently,
> there seem to have some bugs with profiles and other frequently used
> stuff that bothers regular use. Usability wise, simple things like
> help on highlighting dropdown lists as well as checkboxes can help
> users that didn't memorize any arguments use Zenmap.

I agree that the Zenmap interface should be improved. It has been
getting better, though. What we're looking for here is someone with a
concrete idea of how the interface should look and work. If you're
planning to include this in your proposal, you should remember to
include some drawings of the changes you intend to make.

What version of Zenmap do you base your comments on? Does your profile
editor screen look like this?
http://nmap.org/book/zenmap-profile-editor.html#zenmap-edit-command
Jurand Nogiec worked two summers ago to add that interactive help. Is
that what you had in mind?

> A graphical output (progress/status bar) would keep the user in the
> loop about what the application is doing. Currently, it's still in
> text form and not really benefitting from the GUI.

The difficulty here is finding a way to get that information out of Nmap
to show in the GUI. Right now, the best option is to use --stats-every
with Nmap, and parse the completion percentage from the output. An
existing obstacle to this is that Zenmap doesn't parse the output file
incrementally, but all at once at the end. This is definitely a desired
Summer of Code task (http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2010/q1/1007), so if
you have an idea for how to do it you should include it in your
proposal.

> On the mobile side, I have worked on a year long cloud image
> processing research project using the Android. Are you more interested
> in reproducing the features of nmap using the mobiles' native
> development languages like Objective-C and Java or are you also
> addressing clients that would be interested to use custom rooted
> images and cross compiled in other languages?

I don't know much about mobile development, but we don't want to have
two separate codebases. (No porting Nmap to Java.)

David Fifield

P.S. I'm copying this to nmap-dev () insecure org because that's where
we've been having the discussion about Summer of Code ideas.
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