Re: Gnome Feature Request

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

2011/5/8 Erick Pérez <erick red gmail com>

First, the word 'service' here give the wrong impressions that the
Dictionary have to be running, and that's not what I meant, not even a
dictionary module.

What registers the association if not running code?
 

On 08/05/2011, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> OK, let's take your first example: Evince + Dictionary
>
> Let's imagine your system exists, along with the Dictionary service that's
> registered with it.
>
> Would this act upon specific things? So... the Dictionary registers that for
> a "WORD", it has the ability to "Look up on GNOME Dictionary"

For 'Word' or 'Text', Dictionary can 'Show Definition'

Sure, OK, so evince looks for "applications that can handle words", and the service replies "well, the Dictionary can look up a word, that's an option". "Your web browser can search for the word"...

So this is a very specific concept based around some data, and a known piece of information about the data, and getting context-sensitive results about a piece of data.
 

> And then, when right-clicking, along with the usual results, evince would
> try and send out to the service "What are all the things that you can do
> with a WORD?"

Not when right clicking. Evince will check at start-up for things it
will be interested on, for instance, which app can 'handle text' or
'lookup word definitions', or 'handle image', or anything else,
Then on right click there will be and item which will cal dictionary
the way it should be to show the window with the definition. and

Why at startup?

"handle text" and "handle image" are completely different than "lookup word defintitions"

If we want collaboration between apps, we need a very specific list of actions that an app can register for, and that an app can search for. Having "lookup word definitions" is completely useless for that, because I doubt anything besides the dictionary service will implement it.

D-Bus already has the concept of interfaces, so if you wanted to search for an application that implemented "lookup word definitions", you'd make a new "org.gnome.Dictionary" interface wtih "LookupWord" or so, define a signature, and then have applications implement and use that.. D-Bus will automatically reroute to whatever it thinks is the correct application -- anything implementing the D-Bus interface is fair game, so it's not quite the same "gnome-dictionary".

Suggesting something that can gather all these interfaces given the query "what are some things I can do with a word" could be useful, but we'd need to design the data types so that the service can actually be useful for everyone.

Erick


--

El derecho de expresar nuestros pensamientos tiene algún significado
tan sólo si somos capaces de tener pensamientos propios.
El miedo a la libertad, Erich Fromm