Tuesday 6 March 2007

The return of the Bluetooth stuff

I spent my day (and a large part of a very late night yesterday) playing with BlueZ' D-Bus API. I ported nautilus-sendto to use it instead of gnome-bluetooth (even though it still uses the crappy spinner widget).

It looks (quite) nifty, and warns you if the destination device doesn't support OBEX.




Could someone please make it look a bit less arse? (it's already in SVN)

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

It looks a bit technical. Do you expect people to know what "OBEX" means ?

Anonymous said...

yaaay, you're my hero. any chance of some sort of release in the next couple of weeks so we can get it in the next mandriva release?

Anonymous said...

I'm working on Gnome Bluetooth support for Mandriva 2007.1

Is it possible to have a patch against 0.8 for bluetooth support ?

I'll add it to nautilus-sendto before Mandriva 2007.1 Freeze.

You can send your patch to eandry@mandriva.org

Thanks !

Anonymous said...

Did you forgot to add bluetooth-marshal.list?

make[3]: *** No rule to make target `bluetooth-marshal.list', needed by `bluetooth-marshal.c'. Stop.

Juri said...

You're a superstar.

I seriously wanted a Bluetooth plugin for Tomboy, but never got around it because I didn't feel like fighting the battle needed to make nautilus-sendto accessible to stuff outside Nautilus.

Rock on.

Anonymous said...

In my opinion the window should be re-organised, are there different methods to send?

It should be something like this

Send to (List of available devices | V)
Send via (Bluetooth | V)
Send ( Packed in zip | V ) Called [ textbox ]

Error messages etc...

Or something like that, reducing the amount of vertical and un-necessary spaces, removing a compression menu with 3 elements which can easily be packed into 2 making the whole thing smaller.

My 2c

Anonymous said...

You'd need to explain more about what the dialog is used for before someone can do some usability cleaning up.
For example: what is 'Send as' for? What might the possibilities be, other than Bluetooth?

Bastien Nocera said...

Marco, thanks for the notice. I obviously didn't notice the problem myself ;)

bestouff said...

Well, if the app knows OBEX is unavailable, why does it still propose it ? Why not just switch to something else ?

Bastien Nocera said...

Xavier, you can't just remove it from the list, we have no way of knowing if the remote device supports OBEX without contacting it, and it's slow...

Marius Gedminas said...

OBEX Push and OBEX FTP are two different protocols. Why does the dialog warn about OBEX FTP when you're trying to use OBEX Push?

Nitpicking aside, it's very nice to hear that someone is working on Bluetooth support.

Anonymous said...

How about a device discovery/pairing interface, which makes devices appear in computer://? Or at least an entry in there which lets you search/bind/probe devices.

With that in place you start getting lots of things easily - a suitable gnome-vfs layer allows sendto to be a drag&drop.

It also opens up huge potential for an easy interface for using other bluetooth system services - such as DUN, headset, etc.

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