Desktop Session Presence Manager

[Alex Jones <alex weej com>]

Hi list

I'm starting to hack on a little utility that sits on the session bus
emitting signals to alert any interested applications of session
presence updates. The idea is that all applications that are interested
in doing magic things when the user is "away", etc., no longer need to
have their own code for dealing with it, and that the user does not have
to set themselves as "Gone to the shops" in more than one application
(IM clients being the obvious case).

My idea is to take the simple concept of the Gossip status icon and put
it into this new app. Of course, this isn't the only way to set status,
as any app on the session bus can manipulate it. This includes cases
such as Metacity, which could temporarily set the status to Busy when
running a full-screen application (of course this would be configurable
via Metacity's own options).

Perhaps one day, the functionality of this application could be merged
into GNOME Session or something.

Does anybody have any comments on this idea? Does anybody see anything
negative about this approach?

Thanks for reading!
-- 
Alex Jones <alex weej com>