Re: Discussing LaunchServices (was Re: google summer of code)

[BALATON Zoltan]

On Wed, 17 May 2006, Quentin Mathé wrote:
> I don't understand why you are talking about Dock and Fiend. But otherwise

I meant that apps that are starting other apps or work with icons 
currently need to closely interoperate with the workspace manager app 
(which is probably implied by the OpenStep spec too). This could be solved 
by a library which makes it possible to develop these apps more 
independently and remove assumptions about a specific workspace manager 
from gui (which was the original idea anyway and as Apple seemingly 
already did with LaunchServices).

> I'm following you on this library idea, but I would be interested by 
> something fairly different from LaunchServices (or similar). I mean not 
> relying on the usual file extensions / applications binding. I would take in 
> account the application role and rely on UTI (considering file extensions 
> only as a fallback).

I was only advocating the functionality not the specific implementation. 
We already have code to handle this in GWorkspace and gui, so the first 
step would be to gather this into a library and define an API (which does 
not have to be the same as LaunchServices') then we are free to enhance 
this library with support for UTIs instead of file extensions, etc. This 
is not something I intend to work on at this point, but was proposing it 
as a summer of code project and meant LaunchServices as a model for this.

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan