media handling ("autoplay") followup

Joe [1]: I already proposed a “desktop-entry-hotplug-spec” [2] some time ago. I sent it two times and didn’t receive any feedback, so I wasn’t sure whether it is considered important.

The other feature you demanded (actions for files) is IIRC already implemented by KDE. I’m not sure how we should tackle this and I am not so happy with the KDE system.

Example:


[Desktop Action reSize640x480]
Name=Scale to 640×480
Icon=images
Exec=mogrify -resize 640×480! %U
Terminal=false
Type=Application

While it allows for maximum flexibility we’ll end up with a can of worms when internationalizing this since it will be distributed with each application, especially with routine actions like printing. Also, it doesn’t consider how many items are selected - it is common to use ngettext() for internationalizing strings referring to countable objects.

It would really be great if we at least had some actions - maybe similar to those in [2] - for printing and enqueueing. Applications would simply provide a special Exec parameter, and we could immediately see that an application provides this capability.

Oh, and while we’re at it I also have an old “keyword-spec” draft that might be of general interest. I’ll sent it to you by email to get some feedback.

[1] http://joeshaw.org/2007/01/14/452

[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2006-October/msg00002.html

6 Responses to “media handling ("autoplay") followup”

  1. Luca Says:

    Christian, great work, really. BTW desktop actions are also supported by XFCE [1], GNOME should really support them too.

    [1] - http://xfce-diary.blogspot.com/2006/02/desktop-actions.html

  2. Justin Says:

    For “actions”, Quicksilver (http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/what_is_quicksilver) should be used as an example of how to do things in a flexible manner. I think it is still a misunderstood application, the last discussion I saw about it was mostly people asking “How is this different from the deskbar applet?”

  3. Christian Neumair Says:

    Luca: Thanks. Do you know where the XFCE architecture you mention is described/specified?

  4. Luca Says:

    Christian, the implementation is probably somewhere here:
    http://svn.xfce.org/svn/xfce/thunar/trunk/thunar-vfs/thunar-vfs-mime-application.c
    Or in one of the thunar-vfs-mime-* files. Sorry but I can’t be more precise. As for the specification they follows freedesktop too.

  5. Luca Says:

    This:
    http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374
    and this
    http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1375
    seem to be the relevant bugs.

  6. Luca Says:

    Oddly enough, it seems that multiple actions were stripped from freedesktop specification because “under-specified and not widely implemented”… [1][2] [1] - http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/menus/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec.xml?r1=1.12&r2=1.13 [2] - http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/menus/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec.xml?r1=1.8&r2=1.9


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