Guidance sought on collaboration techniques

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

James Simmons wrote:
> When I wrote collaboration into the View Slides activity I just copied 
> the code from the base Read activity so I could copy an entire slideshow 
> from one machine to another.  That didn't work all that well

No?  It would be good to know why.  Also, Telepathy now has a high-level
File Transfer API.  If you can afford to depend on the development builds
of Sugar (soon to be released as 0.84), then this might make your life
much easier regardless of which solution you choose.

> , so now I'm 
> considering something that I think is both more practical and a better 
> use of collaboration.  The idea is to have buddies that join a slideshow 
> passively view a show being navigated by the master user, sort of like 
> looking over someone's shoulder when he reads.

As has been noted elsewhere, this might one day be available to all
Activities, by having Sugar provide a view-only VNC server.  That isn't
tremendously difficult (VNC over Telepathy has already been demonstrated)
but no one's stepped up to implement it.  In fact, implementing this might
be easier than writing your own image-sharing system.

> What I have in mind is this:
...
> It occurred to me that the Chat activity must be doing something kind of 
> like this, but I haven't been able to figure out the code in that 
> Activity.

Remember that Telepathy is providing an abstraction layer over Jabber.
Chat is simply using Jabber's basic IM functionality.  I doubt you'll be
able to use Chat as a model for sharing images.

--Ben

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