[Galago-devel] extending presence

[Mark <line72> Dillavou]

Hi All!
-Last week I was sitting through a series of presentations and couldn't
help but laugh when spysweeper pops up in front of the presentation and
starts scanning.  Then in a later presentation, Norton anti-virus pops
up with error messages.  And again in a later presentation, the
presenter was getting im messages (fortunately the im window stayed
behind the powerpoint presentation, but the presenter still had sound
on).  After watching this, I thought to myself, it sure would be nice to
be able to change my status on a computer to something like presentation
mode which would disable sounds, pop-ups and anything else that might
interrupt presentations.

I then remembered the galago project and its presence management system.
I know that what I am proposing doesn't fall exactly in line with
current development, but I believe that galago could be extended to
support this if desired.

Right now with galago, it looks like you can basically set your presence
as here or away, and this lets other users know your status and how to
contact you.  I feel that it would be useful to have many profiles:
here, away, presentation, meeting, gaming, etc.  Not only would these
tell other users your status, but they would also notify local programs
of your status.  

For instance, if you set your status to presentation, this would disable
any program from popping up or taking focus of the screen (with the
exception of critical messages like a laptop battery dying).
Presentation mode could also disable the screensaver, mute sounds from
im or email notifications, and it may also disable cron jobs so your
presentation doesn't run slowly.  While I'm aiming this at
presentations, these could easily be extended.  A user could have a
gaming profile which would disable a lot of programs, and maybe limit
network traffic from programs other than the game.  It would also
disable cron jobs and anything else that may effect performance. 

So, is this too far off base from where you are trying to go with
galago, or does this seem like something that could fit into the galago
framework.  I have limited time, but would be willing to help out with
implementing this.

Thanks,
/Mark