[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Maemo Alarm/Notifier Interface

[From: Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On 1/10/06, Devesh Kothari <devesh.kothari at nokia.com> wrote:
> I am currently looking for what developer requirements would be from
> such an Alarm/Notifier interface. Specially lot of developers working on
> applications which need to schedule events and notifications like PIM
> aplications need this functionality, and it is just not there yet in the
> Maemo Development Platform.
>
> Some starters
>
> 1. API to
>    - enable notifier/alarm events
>    - cancel previously scheduled events
>    - ability to specify sound file to be played for events [I guess this
> can be done by the application handling the notifier event, so maybe not
> relevant]

I would like to have a simple-to-use approach, just like GObject does
with the additional option to set to a given time (can be seconds
since unix epoch, time_t or something like this). As GObject functions
it should return the id and then you should be able to remove by this
id.

I would like to have the system subsys to play and also specify a
message (Rich text) to be displayed, this would eliminate the need to
start the application just to say the alarm was due. For user and dev
conveniece, this subsystem would get the option to postpone events at
alarm creation time... maybe developers may specify the next value,
something like:

add_alarm( sometime, "You need to backup", one_day_delay, backup_callback );

That would be presented to user like:

You need to backup
[ Do it ] [Postpone to tomorrow ]


If user click the second button, alarm subsys will reschedule the
event automatically. Many kinds of PDA apps would benefit from this.

Also, the subsystem would need to enable 2 options of callback: using
DBUS and executing a program (like cron does). The last option is
needed since the user may not have the application opened or don't
need to open it to do the action (some shell script provided may do
the trick).



> 2. Alarm/Notifier sub system features
> - ability to schedule multiple notifier alarm event
> - ability to wake up device on events

Great.

--
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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