[maemo-developers] Allowing rotation of closed-source apps

[From: Alberto Mardegan]

Hi all!
   Since it looks like we are going to have a virtual keyboard which 
supports portrait mode [0], it would be nice if we were able to rotate 
closed-source applications too (such as the Conversations app).

I think that this should be possible to achieve by modifying 
hildon-desktop so that it can override the window rotation flags of 
certain windows. To make this work, we would need to uniquely identify 
the windows created by clients (I'm not sure how, but I think it's 
possible), and then look up a few settings from GConf (or a GSettings 
file) which would override the rotation settings specified by the 
application.

So, for instance, we could have settings like this for the Conversation 
application:

HD/override/rtcom-messaging-ui/orientation = auto

And for those windows which are unusable in portrait mode (<window> is 
some way to identify a window inside an application):

HD/override/rtcom-messaging-ui/<window>/orientation = landscape

Then we would either need a settings tool to configure this, or some 
keyboard shortcuts to be pressed when the selected window is in the 
foreground.


What do you think about all this? I didn't check hildon-desktop and mb2 
source code yet, so if you also happen to have some hints on the 
implementation, they are very welcome. :-)

Ciao,
   Alberto

[0]: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=68924

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