Re: Desktop Session Presence Manager

[Srinivasa Ragavan <sragavan novell com>]

On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 10:52 +0000, Alex Jones wrote:
> 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).
I assume that by Presence Updates you mean that the presence of the user
at the Desktop instead the IM. Correct me if Im wrong.

Looks like a great idea for apps to listen to such signals. Based on
these, stuffs like lazy/offline caching can be triggered. 

-Srini.
> 
> 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!