Re: use cases not covered by media capture under DAP

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Brian LeRoux <b@brian.io> wrote:

> - image destination (local to app, to the SD card, filesystem, as base64
> string)
>

I've been working on the camera & gallery web apps for Mozilla's Boot to
Gecko project (a mobile OS), and where to store photographs taken with the
camera is a big open question for us.

A couple of common use cases on mobile devices:

   1. Locally storing photographs in such a way that they can be accessed
   from multiple web apps (i.e. a gallery)
   2. Mounting the stored photographs as a file system, where the user
   agent device (e.g. a smartphone) acts as a USB mass storage device plugged
   into a USB host (e.g. a desktop PC), or a memory card is taken from the
   device and placed in a memory card reader to be plugged into a host device
   (e.g. a desktop PC)

Currently the only programmatic method available for local storage of
images on Mozilla is to store them in IndexedDB, which doesn't fulfill
either of the use cases listed above.

File API: Writer doesn't either as I believe implementations create a
sandboxed file system which can only be accessed from one web app (domain).

The File API: Directories and System spec could maybe make this possible,
but I don't think Mozilla has any plans on implementing this due to various
concerns.

The W3C's "Gallery API" (http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/gallery/) has been
shelved, but I'm told WAC 2.0 has a similar API with a "virtual root" for
the storage of images (
http://specs.wacapps.net/2.0/jun2011/deviceapis/filesystem.html)

Ben

-- 
Ben Francis
http://tola.me.uk
http://krellian.com