Re: visual feedback on launching applications

["Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" <famrom idecnet com>]

Mary Dwyer ireland sun com (2000-10-31 at 1548.42 +0000):
[...]
> Suggestion is:
> 1.  Gnome apps 
[...]

Sounds fine.

> 2.   Non-Gnome applications.
>      
>      - in order to make the call to the Feedback Server to start the feedback
>        need to use a binary wrapper (I'll refer to it here as 'fbk' to avoid 
>        confusion with references to Xalf).
>        The binary makes the call to start the feedback and then forks
>        and starts the application
[Draw that my editor damages due tabs]
>        			 
>       - the call to stop the feedback could be made using LD_PRELOAD and 
>         an overloaded Xlib function and LD_PRELOAD (similar to what Xalf does). 

I was going to say that if you do not use the wrapper it does not
work... but Xalf does that, so nothing new about it. Does anybody know
a way to avoid the wrapper? So if user launches "foo" and not "fbk
foo" it still works if he configured fbk to always work. Just to do it
right all the times, even after guessing that most of that users
already know what they do (how many people with few knowledge lauch
this way instead of panels or menus? IMO few).

BTW, I think you forgot to add that the fbk should include a time out,
to avoid problems, maybe including some kind of logging ("warning:
feedback for foo timed-out after x seconds, slow app? few time-out?").

> 3.    Applications launched from panel
> 	The gnome panel launches apps with a call to gnome_execute_async_*()
> 	in gnome-libs.  But, cannot assume that the app to be launched is a
> 	gnome application.  So would have to adapt solution no. 2 above, ie
> 	gnome_execute_*() could make a call to the fbk binary. 
> 	However, if the app to be launched is a gnome app then there would be
> 	a second call to start the Feedback from gnome_init_().  So the 
> 	Feedback Server would have to be able to handle such duplicate calls.

Sounds very logical. NS is a case of this, and it is used a lot.

> I am new to GNOME (BTW my name is Mary Dwyer and I work in Sun Microsystems in 

Welcome. :]

> Ireland) and I'd like to get feedback (excuse the pun) criticisms, suggestions 
> etc on this.I emailed Peter Astrand (author of the Xalf utility) at the end of 
> last week to get his views on the idea.  And the emails below would indicate 
> that people on these gnome aliases would be interested in this area? 

What aliases? Mailing lists? ?:-/

GSR