Re: Media Access/Device Storage/Gallery API

On Jun 1, 2012, at 20:00 , Steve VanDeBogart wrote:
> I don't think the web intent approach is appropriate for local files because it requires too much user intervention; consider a photo album type application that is meant to help your organize your local pictures.  The user wants to be able to grant access to an entire gallery, not just individual pictures.  Furthermore, in the steady state, the user won't want to select their galleries each time they open their photo album app, they'll want it to retain access. Web intents aren't really designed to do that and I don't think it makes sense to add that kind of feature.

I think that the massive cross-post going on here is causing some conflation of use cases.

Steve's example use case is valid, and within the context of the SysApps group it would certainly be valuable to provide a powerful gallery API that can do much more than the intents version, possibly without user intervention. In fact, implementing a local content intent would likely require such an API. That's for the part that SysApps is concerned with.

Within DAP's scope, a very simple and straightforward intents-based gallery API, with its known limitations, is equally useful (but for different uses). That's why DAP's in the loop.

The Intents TF is in the loop because the API proposed for DAP uses Intents (and has an implementation: https://github.com/jungkees/gallery/).

There is natural overlap and complementarity between an intents-based API and a system level one, if only in terms of the metadata that's attached, and possibly in how one represents input (e.g. searches) and output (files, URIs, etc.). I see that both are needed, and as the two are being developed it would be very useful if a communication channel were kept open.

But I don't think that crossing the beams is useful just yet! It would likely be more productive to keep different thread separate as this discussion evolves; more specifically:

• For SysApps, what are the use cases for this API (no matter what it's called) and should it be prioritised.
• For DAP, do we like the proposed design for the intent and how do we move forward on refinements, publication, etc.
• For Intents, looking at what Jungkee put together are the obvious issues with intents for this use case and if any how can they be addressed.

I think the resulting discussions will be a lot clearer :)

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Monday, 4 June 2012 13:10:28 UTC