Hello, There's something I'm thinking about for a while that could handle the given use cases. I'm talking about a Telepathy interface  to handle activities. Activities are related to rich presence information, there can be two types of activities : application activity (the user is listening to music, watching a movie, editing a file...) and verbatim activity (the user is describing his current activity in a verbatim way). The first type of activity described here, combined with priority rules, could be exploited to create the behaviors you're willing (when the user is reading a stream in the web browser, the music player pauses). The second one could be exploited by instant messages applications that allow you to define a personal message, by Twitter and other social networks that give you the opportunity to broadcast your status. I think Telepathy is the right place to implement such an API. Several connection managers could provide that information (for instance, Gabble could implement <a href="http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0108.html"> http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0108.html</a>, butterfly could provide the personal message, ...) and a "social network" connection manager could appear and help as well. If that sounds like a good solution to you, I'm very interested in working on the definition of such an interface. Johann <div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 12, 2008 11:22 PM, Scott Peterson <<a href="mailto:lunchtimemama@gmail.com">lunchtimemama@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Here is the problem: I like listening to music. I listen to music while doing almost anything else - reading, writing, coding, browsing, painting. There are some activities which are at odds with my musical enjoyment - watching a video, listening to a podcast or audio book, voice-chatting with someone. In the course of my daily web-browsing, I come across perhaps ten or more youtube videos. On each occasions I must pause my music player (Banshee) before watching the youtube video and resume my music when the video is over. I am doing the machine's job for it. What should happen: If I am listening to music and any of the following happens - I play video or audio in the browser; I open video or audio from the drive; I receive or initiate a VoIP call; I record audio via Audacity or some similar program; I do anything else which requires my aural attention - the music should pause. When I complete the interstitial task the music should resume. How this should happen: The general idea is to have a DBus-based "attention" API. There are several ways such a system could work, but here is one example: compliant applications report their "attention requirements" through the API. For example, when Banshee plays a song, it would report requiring "passive aural" attention. When Banshee plays a podcast or any file of the "spoken word" genre, it would report requiring "active aural" attention. When totem opens a video, it would report requiring "active aural" and "active visual" attention. When OpenOffice opens a text document, it would report requiring "passive visual" attention. And so forth. Some logic then manages attention but culling passive spectacles in the event of active spectacles, and restoring the culled spectacles when appropriate. This logic could be centralized - when a video plays, it tells Banshee to pause; when a video stops, it tells Banshee to start again - or it could be distributed among the compliant applications - Banshee listens for "active aural" spectacles and pauses for their duration. Other Examples: Aside from the very compelling use-case of music, there are other situations where such an API could be useful. * Presence - Pidgin automatically changes status to "away" depending on the state of attention. If no windows are visible and no audio is playing, the user is very likely away from the machine and the "away" status is appropriate after a very short period of inactivity. If an active video is in the foreground, the user is likely at the machine. Perhaps "watching movie" is an appropriate status to automatically adopt. * Screensaver - Similar to presence example, the screensaver should not activate if a movie is active in the foreground, despite any length of input inactivity. * ? - At the moment, every application is coded under the assumption that it has the user's full attention at all times - every app is oblivious of every other app. The rise of multi-core processors only means more multitasking, and empowering application developers with attention data will enable new and sophisticated UIs and behaviours never before possible. Road to an API: This is an idea I've had for a while and I've given some thought to a few of the technical details and problems with this idea, but first I would like to gauge the interest of the XDG. If you think this is a useful idea, please voice your confidence. If you think there are potential problems with this idea, please ask and I'll do my best to make up something. If you think this is a terrible waist of time, lay it on me! If there's sufficient interest, we can go from there. -Scott Peterson _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list <a href="mailto:xdg@lists.freedesktop.org"> xdg@lists.freedesktop.org</a> <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg</a> </blockquote></div>