[maemo-developers] passing arguments to hildon applications

[From: josh.soref at nokia.com]

ext Andrew Daviel <mailto:andrew at andrew.triumf.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, josh.soref at nokia.com wrote:
> 
>> It's actually been poorly supported/unsupported for years.
> 
> How hard can it be .. download a file to a temporary
> directory, spawn an
> application and tell it the filename. It worked in Mosaic, it
> works in
> Lynx. (never mind, I'm not sure I really want to know ...)

Go read the spec. some of the handlers want urls not files.

Now here's a simple problem:

How do you know which handler to pick?
Oh, you check the mime type.

How do you find the mime type?
Oh, you download the file.

What if the file is behind a one time token?
Oh, you're in trouble.

What if the file requires a cookie?
Oh, good luck passing that url to a handler.

Now, if you only care about the simple file cases, then yeah, that's
almost supported by most things.
But the spec supports all sorts of fun bits.

>> Someone should write a dbus wrapper thing....
> 
> I found one (Eero told me how to make it work).

Yeah, I was hoping someone would include the name (I know it's in the
archives), as someone else asked me about it for some other purpose
yesterday.

> I'm not sure if I can pass an argument in a Dbus service
> record (probably not; in which case I'd have to create a
> separate wrapper for each MIME type, or get a name
> from a symbolic link or something).

> But in reality I'm not that likely to want to port Xdvi or
> Xfig to the tablet; most documents are saved in PDF.

> Mplayer on the other hand would be nice to have -
> preferably with a robust plugin that would play those
> Hollywood trailer embedded WMV movies or streaming media from CBC.ca

Personally, I've tried to suggest that people get totem or a similar
proper NPAPI plugin configured.

The browser's default plugin can be disabled from the mangify button in
the toolbar, which means it really shouldn't be too hard.

The only trick is deciding how much integration you want w/ the system
components (I'd suggest none).

What I've suggested internally is that the idea media plugin would
basically support streaming and pass the data to an out of [browser]
process which would handle the media playback. Whether it sticks ui
controls into the browser or just has a button which brings the media
player forward is not my problem :).

>From playing w/ flash movies on my mac w/ two displays, I'm actually
fairly annoyed w/ them... Because they have this full screen button,
which will full screen on the proper display (aux), but when I click on
another application, the full screen mode is discarded. So I can't
actually watch a full screen video while using my computer's primary
display to do work ....

I mention this because I think wanting to full screen videos is a fairly
common task, and bad implementations, especially for embeddings will
result in unhappy users. Of late, I can't really think of many cases
where I actually need to be able to see a video and do something else on
my tablet at the same time, and in the cases when I do, I'm fairly
certain that having them fixed in the browser's frame will not agree w/
me (iow, I'd rather the video float above the browser, so that I can
scroll around the page while "watching" the video).

> (they dropped RealPlayer from a lot of the site)

:(

> - on my desktop I end up doing things in Firefox like
> Tools/PageInfo/Media, clip the media URL and give it
> to mplayer on the command line - ugly, but usually works.

Heh.