Presence and IntComm WG

[Mark Sirota <>]

--On 8/29/06 1:20 AM -0400 Ben Teitelbaum 
<>
 wrote:
> 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?

Good thought, Ben.  I have mixed feelings.

I like the concept a lot, and I especially like that there's an existing
community already out there evangelizing.

However, it's Mac-specific (which heavily limits the people who could play)
and the vast majority of those 157+ applications are tiny little things
most people have never heard of.  I don't think I'd want to rely on this as
the sole message delivery agent.

Perhaps the way to go is to do both -- one of the little modules I'm
thinking of could be a Growl client, which delivers messages to the
presence manager in the same way that an AppleScript program would. So we
get all the Growl-aware apps "for free", while simple AppleScript routines
could be written for all the more well-known apps that people are already
using (many of them are AppleScript aware, either because Apple wrote them
or Apple itself is out there evangelizing).

I don't know enough about Windows to know whether there's something similar
there.

Anyone else have an opinion?

Mark