Re: gnome-shell application intergration



El mié, 16-06-2010 a las 05:04 +0000, kaddy080 gmail com escribió:
>  I have tried Pidgin and sent myself messages from another computer/IM
>   account... and the message tray does not act the same way as it does
> when your using empathy. With empathy, you are able to recieve msgs
> and reply to messages straight from the message tray at the bottom
> instead of opening up your messenger window.... 
> With pidgin, you get the msg at the bottom, but you cannot click on it
> and reply etc...... 

Yes, that is correct, there is no integration of Pidgin with the Shell -
the message you see at the bottom is nothing more than a normal desktop
notification (just like in GNOME 2.X).

There are good reasons though to "choose Empathy over Pidgin" - Pidgin
is a stand-alone messaging application, while Empathy is a front-end to
a desktop-wide framework (which implies that other front-ends to the
same framework enjoy exactly the same integration as Empathy).

Fact is, the chat integration has been implemented with a few hundred
lines of Javascript in GNOME Shell and no modifications at all in
Empathy.

To even come close to this kind of integration with Pidgin would require
huge amounts of work - I could think of the following approaches:

(1) Ask the Pidgin developers to change their architecture to allow
    things like sharing connections between different processes
    (in case it's not clear: this is about as reasonable as asking
     Gnome to drop GTK+ in favour of QT)
(2) Use Pidgin's backend (libpurple) to implement an entire messaging
    client inside the Shell - this would require wrapping libpurple to
    be usable from JS and reimplementing pidgin's user interface.
(3) Develop a custom protocol for sharing IM services and add support
    for it to both Pidgin and GNOME Shell.

Any of these approaches would take many months (or even years) to
develop, and the result would still be inferior to the integration we
have with Telepathy.


> and as for other Music players, it is the same thing... you cannot
> interact with the message tray to be able to
> control the application... such as skipping songs etc..... but you can
> do this if you are using rhythmbox. 

This is actually nothing new. At least for now, I don't know of a single
change to Rhythmbox to integrate further in GNOME Shell - the buttons to
skip songs work just the same in GNOME 2.X with the (standard)
notification-daemon. Those "actions" have always been part of the
notification spec. It is an optional feature though, so notification
"servers" can opt to not support them - which is what Canonical did with
their notify-osd.

So there is nothing which stops applications like Banshee from doing the
same - actually, Rhythmbox' "integration" predates GNOME Shell
development for years.

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