[Gnash-dev] widget for paused movie / GUI extension

[strk]

Hello friends, a quick braindump.

I'm thinking it would be nice to have Gnash print a message
when the movie is paused, as I find it very handy to start
gnash in pause mode when run from the plugin (I do this using
the GNASHRC env variable and the StartStopped rc setting)
but it's not nice to see a black window...

Now, while approaching the problem I was thinking that handling
a "paused" widget would be a lot of code duplication if we have to
do it in all GUIs. Instead, we might build SWF-widgets which would
be loaded by the Stage (movie_root) and always displayed on top
on request from the GUI. Each widget might map to an enumeration
of semantically meaningful screens, but should also interact
with the GUI in the reverse order (ie: user clicks on a widget button
to unpause the movie).

In order to do so (have an SWF character talk with the Gnash GUI)
we'd need a GUI extension, which would likely break a few invariants
(ie: let the user disable extensions loading, don't pollute the
namespace etc.).

Do you think it would be worth the trouble to indagate further
in this direction or should we be handling this in each GUI instead ?

--strk;

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