Active activities as Widgets

[Eben Eliason]

> >>> 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.
> >>>
> >> I thought this was intended to be a feature similar to the frame (and
> >> actually summoned by the frame key), layered on top of the activity,
> >> so it actually would work for *all* activities, Python or not.
> >>
> >
> > Definitely, it would have to work for all the activities.
> >
>
> Not quite what I had in mind, so I'll go ahead with my chat widget and
> publish a wiki page on it.

Can you elaborate on the inadequacies you see in this design?  It
would be useful as we move forward with considerations for the
ubiquitous chat interface.  Unless specifically necessary to the
activity in some fashion, we'd prefer to depend on this interface,
preventing the need for individual activities to implement custom
solutions which can come at a loss of consistency and a gain in
activity size and duplicated code.

- Eben