Thursday 28 May 2009

Plugins, here they come


We now have plugins in gnome-bluetooth. The purpose is to allow third-party applications to offer additional setup steps for the Bluetooth device you just configured.

The above screenshot shows an example plugin that NetworkManager could provide, and with the click of a button, you'd have PAN set up between your computer and your mobile phone.

If your phone supports SyncML, then Conduit could show a button to allow setting up syncing, or when setting a GPS, you could have a button to set it up as the default GPS device for GeoClue.

Those plugin-provided widgets will also be available in a device properties dialogue for the Bluetooth preferences, when I get to it.

PS: Diego has kindly agreed to help out with the FreeFA organisation.
PPS: The widget layout is pretty broken, feel free to send patches through bugzilla.

4 comments:

Rob Taylor said...

That's brilliant! Yay for a modern bluetooth experience :)

One note: I notice that has_config_widget is a blocking call. That might suck a bit if the plugin needs to query or poke the device to see if it supports whatever the plugin is proving.

Bastien Nocera said...

Shouldn't be required. If a profile is advertised on the device, then it should be available.

If you have a specific use case in mind, feel free to file a bug, and we'll see what can be done.

Rob Taylor said...

@hadess: me and jc2k had a little chat, and decided you're right :)

In general we shouldn't be probing devices as its asking for trouble. We will however be needing some sort of database of devices to capabilities and quirks, for devices that fail to advertise properly. Any ideas of where this could live in the new DeviceKit order?

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