Bluetooth device detection



Hija,

I'm working on a SoC project regarding HID device handling in the GNOME
desktop. One of the targets is to make it easier to work with Bluetooth
devices: not the ones which got a docking station and act like any
normal USB device (there's no need to discover these, that "just
works"), but devices which need a built-in BT adapter (like the Logitech
Traveller I got here).

For these devices, you always need to discover them (at least) once, by
pressing a button on them, then start some discovery software. Once this
is done, the mouse will store the BT address of your machine and pair
automagicly. At least, that's how I understood things.

Now, there needs to be some place in our desktop where the user can
start this discovery when he wants to add hardware. I was thinking about
these possibilities:
- An applet (or tray icon) with some "Discover Bluetooth hardware"
action connected to it.
	Advantage: pretty easy to find the functionality as it's always on your
screen.
	Disadvantage: pretty stupid to have a process for this and clutter your
panel when you only use this function only once in a while (< once per
month).
- Add a "Discover new mouse" button to the gnome-mouse-properties
capplet.
	Advantage: euh, dunno.
	Disadvantage: it's not the first place I would look for this
functionality.
- Add a totally new capplet, "Add hardware". This would consist of some
wizard where in the first dialog you can choose between all supported
devices which can not be auto-discovered (think about a BT mouse, a BT
keyboard, a parallel printer, a parallel/scsi scanner). The next
screen(s) would be device-specific. In the mouse case, you could be
asked to select a connection method in the second screen, after which
discovery is performed, and your hardware "works". Discovered
information should be stored somewhere so the user doesnt need to go
through the wizard every session, obviously.
	Advantage: adding new hardware to the system is all handled in one
place. Something like gnome-cups-add can be integrated into this capplet
too, same for scanner configuration.
	Disadvantage: lots of functionality in one application, maybe not very
HIGy.

Any thoughts on this, better sugestions,...?

Thanks,

Nicolas

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part



[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]