Active activities as Widgets

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Hello,

> > I would like the ability to exploit other active activities in my own 
> > activity.
> 
> Rainbow is designed to specifically disallow this.

  What I'm going to write here is not really based on the current code
(of which I don't know too much detail), but just an idea (tually
based on an idea of my colleagues)...

  If activities do not always have to run in full-screen, and each
activity exposes some of its capabilities and properties so that they
can be accessed via DBus or some other inter-process messaging
mechanism, these activities don't have to be running in the same
address space, and don't have to share files to work together.  X
Window System can surely display many windows and doesn't care if
these windows are created from the same process or not.  To the user,
a window created by a process for an activity would just look like a
fat "widget".

  It would be OpenDoc on X with process separation, sort of.  In a
sense, this would not be that big departure from current Sugar+DBus
combination.

  A security system for it could still decide which activity can see
whose property, so it can be effective.

> > 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.

  But think about more general cases.  Imagine a user wants to create
a multimedia document with movie, audio, text, painting, etc.,
etc. laid out in one document on one screen.  (Let's say a realization
of BulletinBoard activity.).  If you can use existing activities to
write yours, it would be so simple.  To the user, it just looks like a
multimedia document and each of these media objects are alive, but
internally, they are different processes, looking at different
directory, and doesn't know each other.

  I think OLPC people heard about it and/or thought about it.  I admit
that if each activity consumes 15MB or such, this wouldn't fly.
Nonetheless I think this is an iteresting thought.

-- Yoshiki