Re: Is discovery good enough for wider use cases

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com> wrote:
> I'm a little worried about the Intent constructor growing any further.

:-) Yes. These parameters wouldn't go on the constructor, they'd be
part of the object literal usage. I'm inclined at this point to say we
should go with just the object literal constructor at first, and then
"pave the cowpaths" if there's a reason to make it a bit easier to do
some particularly common use cases.

> Seems like "explicit" and "suggested" could both use the same method though,
> where-ever we stick it.

Right. The hunch is that "service" could mean both. The thing is, for
explicit intents, we want to be able to create a much stronger
expectation for the developer that exactly the service they call is
being used. For "suggestions," we want to create a quite weak
expectation -- "use these if nothing else gets picked" kind of thing,
which is really important for developers to be sure that users won't
get dumped into a dead end empty selection mechanism.

I suspect that a really consolidated rule, like "if there's only one
service, be explicit, if there's more than one, they're suggestions",
would be too confusing -- that's pretty different behavior that is
really hard to understand from inspection! :-)

> I've not heard a call out for it, but what if you wanted to have multiple
> "explicit" services?
>
> Let's say I -only- want to allow posting to two locations, but the user can
> choose which one.

This is pretty easy for the client to do using its own UI: e.g. have
two controls, and if the user select service A, launch that, and for
service B, launch the other. That's one of the key reasons we think
explicit intents are really important: they let web content
essentially provide its own picker.

>
> That's the same construct as setting the default/suggestions, except that
> explicit limits the picker, whereas suggestions allows additional options.
> It may be convoluted...
>
> But anyway, I agree: suggestedServices would work for setting an explicit or
> defaults/suggestions, given a simple toggle.
>
> -Charles
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 16 April 2012 23:49:13 UTC