New Launcher Code
14, MarOne of our issues (one of many, i.e.) was the fact that we kinda scrounged on the earlier code with regards to how the application is launched. How did we get the list of applications? Simple, from the usual location in our debian systems.. '/usr/share/applications'...
Nothing directly wrong there,.. except for one little detail. See its not that we did not know the format of the Freedesktop specs for the *.desktop files, but we were a bit preoccupied with more pressing details, and just used the filename instead.
Thats right, the existing code does not read the 'exec' keyword to determine the launch command, it just filters off the *.desktop from the filename and runs the rest. A Bug you say ?... nah, it was by design because we really, really, really wanted to see it work :)
Yes, its been Bugging us all this while, like you would not believe.
Anyway, the good news is we have finally got down to cleaning these little things up, the new code, reads it properly.
Things to pertaining to this which come to mind
1) Launch command and Display Title by reading the specification files 2) Which icons to use? We would like to use the remote icon, but have decent fallbacks on the local machine too. 3) Need to see how all the command line arguments are passed... this is critical.. for e.g. -- if a url is passed, does it open. Remember in this case, the remote browser opens the url using the remote net connection -- Safety too, in the browser case, a file:// on the browser exposes the filesystem, Not Good!! -- Audio, the local file plays on the remote device, can we use pulse.. to remote stream the audio from remote device to local device? -- Video suffers from the same issue with audio, at least the video plays local. Would be nice to get the audio streaming to local. Right now, for video & audio, We can use a remote application to play a local file, the audio plays on remote device, Not exactly the intended usage ( but good for playing a prank on the remote user ) :) ++ I'm sure there are loads more, can you think of any? let us know, There are heaps we can think of already.