Active activities as Widgets

[Morgan Collett]

Gerard J. Cerchio wrote:
> I would like the ability to exploit other active activities in my own 
> activity.

Rainbow is designed to specifically disallow this.

> If a video conference is already active, and the participants wish to 
> PlayGo I would like to have a panel in the PlayGo application that 
> allows the video call to continue throughout the game. I came upon this 
> idea when I was trying to duplicate the Chat activity within PlayGo just 
> to allow the players to talk to one another. I asked my self, why 
> duplicate code, connections and system resources that are probably 
> already running in RAM?

Sugar will gain a feature called overlay chat, once we've got higher
priority collaboration stuff completed, which will automagically add
chat functionality to any (sugarised, python) activity. There's no time
frame on this feature yet though.

> Looking at how the activity's communications are structured, and being 
> that we are in a early stage of sugar, I do not think this is too lofty 
> of  an intra  communication/display development goal.

Unfortunately I must point out that some activity developers have
assumed, "if it works now it will always work", and then been bitten by
the security framework (or even just changes in Sugar). Save yourself
some future pain :)

Regards
Morgan