[sugar] A Launcher Activity

[Carlos Neves]

Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> On 8/14/07, Carlos Neves <cn at sueste.net> wrote:
>   
>> Anyway, how is the increasing number of activities going to be handled
>> by the launcher?
>>     
>
> See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1739
>   
Ok, I have been wondering about this for a long time now. The piece I 
was missing was the fact that the Journal will list all available 
Activities, not only the ones already launched.
> Any other reasons you would want to aggregate multiple activities
> under the same launcher?
>   
Well, for starters the grouping of activities gets right down obvious. 
All the activities from MaMaMedia are there, launched from it's Activity 
Center. Then there's data sharing, where this one Activity Center holds 
data common to multiple MMM Activities. And we have UI control, which 
may be considered good or bad, as there is an effort to make  everything 
Sugar coherent, but on the other side we make the launcher coherent with 
the Activities in terms  of interface theme.

What I don't see is a good reason for us not to be able to do this. I 
can always create a single activity that holds the Launcher and Apps, 
but that is a pita for multiple reasons, and would not integrate as 
cleanly into Sugar, which is surely desired from every Sugar based 
Activity. There is the security concern, but how exactly would this open 
a door to abuse? I can already run whatever native code I want, I guess. 
Is this to avoid misbehaving apps from bringing sugar to it's sweet knees?

Anyhow, using the Launcher or not is not a question at this stage, it is 
already done. It just doesn't work correctly in current builds, and it 
seems it may stop working in the future, which is something we'll 
struggle to avoid as we see this as a good thing, the Launcher paradigm. 
Of course if there is a good reason (logical, convincing reason, not 
practical like it won't work if we do what we are doing) we'll drop the 
subject and adapt to the best solution, but until then, I'd *really* 
like to try out a solution like the originally proposed and add to it a 
security context to make sure it will keep on working in future versions.

best,

cn