Presence and IntComm WG

[Ben Teitelbaum <>]

Mark Sirota 
<>
 writes:

> That's pretty much exactly what I'm writing!  However, I wasn't
> expecting the apps to push data into it, because that also involves
> persuading those applications to do the pushing.  Instead, I'm
> envisioning an architecture where a series of small standalone
> modules or programs could grab data from iTunes, your calendar, your
> GPS locator, or whatever and send it on to the presence manager.
>

Mark,

Trying to reverse-engineer what a bunch of apps are doing by sniffing
file system events or packets seems hard.  Perhaps it would be better
to build on something that a lot of apps already use to issue
notifications.  

I am thinking specifically of Growl [1], which is MacOS-specific, but
which has quite broad support and is open source.  Growl is supported
by Skype, Colloquy (an IRC client), NewsFire (an RSS reader), and
allegedly 157 other applications.  There are also little daemons
already written to feed iTunes presence [2] and hardware presence [3]
(e.g. which USB devices and network interfaces are active) to Growl.

It seem like Growl might be a good integration point to snarf up
desktop presence to send off via XMPP.  

Your thoughts?

-- ben

1. http://growl.info/
2. http://growl.info/documentation/growltunes.php
3. http://growl.info/documentation/hardwaregrowler.php

-- 
Ben Teitelbaum   http://people.internet2.edu/~ben/