> However, multimedia seems to follow a completely different model: one > has "collections" which are managed, displayed or transmitted. > > How to reconcile these two flows?
I think there are actually three types of UI-based applications that need to be dealt with: - Collection managers - Document creators/viewers - Tasks/widgets I think my sense, and the approach we seem to be taking, is that managers, like iTunes or iPhoto, are just specialized file browsers/ managers. So, they can be represented with some custom views on our file/object manager data. This way, developers wouldn't have to create a full app just to browse and manage music. Instead, they would just define a UI and some custom methods for displaying and interacting with that data in a sensible way, and provide that as a "plug-in" on our file/object manager. This approach would even work for things that a user maybe doesn't think of as a manager, such as a calendar application -- at its heart, it's just a manager for calendar events. The tricky part of all of this is answering the question, "How does the user open up their music library?" Even though it's just a custom view on some data, is it still its own application? Or can any file/object manager window just be transformed into a music player? Document creators/viewers are conceptually well-understood, but, as per my earlier questions, we need to develop their UI model a bit more thoroughly. Tasks/widgets are things like calculators, notifiers, feed readers, language translators, weather updaters, and system reporters (processor load, RAM usage, etc). Most of these should be developed as Services, either with or without a UI. These should not need to have access to the menubar (just as widgets and menubar applets on OS X don't change what application shows up in the menubar when you interact with them), and so don't affect how the user interacts with the system in any meaningful way for this discussion. Does that seem logical? J. _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
