Re: application class thoughts

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

[ dropping the xdg until we're ready to start proposing a serious dbus spec ]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> hi Colin;
>
> thanks for picking up the ball here. I was about to start working on
> this in order to have a GIO patch ready to play with.

Ah, great!  We should combine forces here; I'd actually started
stubbing out a GtkApplication class a while back based on the various
things floating around like the Mx one.

I'd like to get the ball rolling ideally this week.

> On Mon, 2010-04-05 at 11:16 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
>>
> yes; the MeeGo Netbook UX goal is actually to get rid of menus
> altogether and display the actions, whenever needed, inside a simple
> combo-style widget.

This is interesting.  Do you have a link to any design mockups?

> a bit of back story here: the well-known name is something brought in
> from libunique. it served the purpose well, since the well known named
> allowed to implement both a D-Bus based IPC and a UDS-based one - though
> the UDS-based one is just meant as a stopgap solution until D-Bus over
> SSH works properly.

UDS = unix domain socket?

> I'm not overly attached to the well-known name; the dot-desktop file is
> a good requirement as any, and since everyone should have a dot-desktop
> file, it would solve the uniqueness of the name in pretty much the same
> way.

Yeah, that's my take for now but I could be convinced app authors
should have to specify both too.

> the reason I defined actions was not entirely for scriptability (though
> it was a concern); some actions inherently require arguments, unless you
> defer all handling to the application itself - which may or may not fit
> in your user experience. for instance, if I want to open a list of URIs
> with an application I might have a section of my shell that is already
> capable of selecting that list of URIs - hence I should just select the
> list of URIs and then pass them to the application through the
> OpenURIList() action. I'm not sure this falls under the "scripting"
> label; it's more interaction between an application and a shell.

Hmm, I see.  But in this case the shell would need to know that it is
a list of URIs, right?  Not just an array[string].