[Sugar-devel] [PATCH Sugar] Extend sugar-launch with more options

[Gary Martin]

On 20 Jan 2011, at 10:24, Sascha Silbe wrote:

> Excerpts from Martin Abente's message of Thu Jan 20 02:51:19 +0100 2011:
> 
>> Anyways this patch does not change what sugar-launch already does (right?),
>> just gives it more options that can be useful even though we don't use it
>> for what i need in upstream (whenever rainbow is back).
>> 
>> Any good reason to not include it? :)
> 
> Yes, there is: It encourages activity authors to start other activities
> from within their own activities, exactly like you're going to do. We
> shouldn't give them easy access to functionality that we already know
> will stop working in the future.
> 
> I'm also not convinced that this is good UI design, so I'm CC'ing Gary
> for advice. To recollect:
> 
> Martin would like to add an option to sugar-launch that allows
> activities to invoke other activities (already possible) with a given
> URI (new). Launching activities from within another activity won't work
> on Rainbow-enabled systems (by design). The stated use case is starting
> Browse for URLs in the activity UI.

Well, it is a common UI in other operating systems, so I would not specifically call this out as poor from a UI stand point. There have been many long threads about this in the past, with folks wanting to launch activities from each other (common case cited is having lesson plan documents of some kind, that can launch the related activities as you work through them). However, in the discussions I remember, all of them hit the issue of breaching Rainbow and its desired security model. I would also be keen to see Rainbow back in Sugar.

> My suggestion was to offer a very simple HTML widget in sugar-toolkit
> that could be used by the activity to display the document inside the
> running activity.

Whatever the outcome of this thread, I'd love to see a sugar-toolkit HTML widget that activities could easily embed. The issue for activity authors for a longtime is that it may be easy to fork Browse and add in your own html content, but it is very solution brittle and your activity will almost certainly break on each new Sugar release.

> This is another iteration of the "online" (i.e. runtime) activity
> documentation topic.
> 
> Gary, what's your take on this?

Yes, though I think Martin may be after this as part of his Notification work? I've seen one screen shot where some part of the notification text message was a URL link, kind'a worried me at the time (given the above reasons).

Regards,
--Gary

> Sascha
> 
> -- 
> http://sascha.silbe.org/
> http://www.infra-silbe.de/