Re: Gnome Feature Request

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

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

>Why at startup?
Nothing more that it sounded to me that you were suggesting that
Evince will look for service at the time of rendering the menu,
occupational hazards. I hit send to soon, I should now you're too
smart to suggest that.

Why not at the time of the menu? We'd probably need to send the actual data to the service in advance so that an app can make a more reasonable decision... I'd rather see "No definitions" inline in the menu than having a new popup window tell me the new thing.
 

>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.

>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.

As I said in my first mail there a bunch of design/definitions
missing, like a well designed set of verbs or actions the apps can
export. Course

Aren't the verbs the arbitrary things the service returns? I thought we were passing the service the data, and we get back a list of verbs.

>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

Anyway It seems like you got the main idea. that's good, now we can
pass to the useful part of the discussion 

... that was supposed to be a strawman I was trying to knock down in the next sentence. The only tangible idea I can extract out of this is querying a service with something akin to a mimetype, and getting a list of programs that can handle it. I query the service with SEMANTIC_WORD, and I get "/usr/bin/gnome-dictionary-lookup-word %s" back. There might be an inch of value in that idea, but I don't see it. You said that you didn't want a daemon started, so we can't use D-Bus in that case, unless we use D-Bus autostart, but I don't see the value in that either.

If you want to define a new service so that you can call GetProperApplication(LOOKUP_WORD_DEFINITION), I'm sorry, but that's even more useless.

Just define a new D-Bus interface spec with the proper methods, and D-Bus will use whatever the user has configured as the higher prority when you try to call it.

Now, what we should decide is it a piece of software like this could
fit into Gnome, so we can start designing/coding.
I'm not use to Gnome Development dynamics so....

I don't see the value in this service... and I still can't see how you would build jumplists out of this. But if you want to go ahead and build whatever your idea appears to be, nobody's going to stop you.
 

Erick

On 08/05/2011, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> 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
>>
>

--

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