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Becoming Desktop Worthy
Developing an SNS 2 application that can reside on the user desktop
December 10, 2001
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Chris Amelung
SNS Software Developer and PhD Student in the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri
chrisa@coe.missouri.edu
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In this article we are going to look at the requirements for developing an application that can be used by the Desktop Chooser so that items belonging to that application can be placed on the desktop of a user.
An application must be designed to work as a Chooser application if its items are going to be placed on the personal desktop of a user. There are currently five applications that are considered
Chooser apps – File System, Groups, Discussion Boards, Software, and Development. The following is a short description on how to make your application a Chooser app.
For more detailed instructions on this process, please refer to the “Guide to Becoming Desktop Worthy” on
the SourceForge website (http://sourceforge.net/projects/shadownet)
There are three events a Chooser app must implement (to become worthy of the privilege of placing its items on Home :)
config_chooser
This event is called for the purpose of getting a label for the Chooser application. This label is used to show the user the types of items the Chooser application contains.
For example, the File System application returns the label ‘Files’ and the Groups application returns ‘Groups’ for its label.
init_chooser
Through this event, the Chooser application displays a list of its items to be selected by the user. Each application should provide to the user a means of selecting the
items desired, an indication of what items have been previously selected, and a means of canceling the choosing process.
configure_chooser_desktop
This event is used to return an array reference of desktop items that will be placed on the desktop. Each element of the array should contain:
name - title of item
icon - icon for item
url - xlink to item
Once these events have been implemented, you should register your app with the code 'chooser' to finish the process of becoming a Chooser app.
Open your program.xml file and insert the following line:
<code>chooser</code>
Save the file and register. Currently, Katana1 is the best way to register an app.
That’s it. Simply create the three events and register your application and your application will be desktop worthy.
1 Katana is a developer tool that is, at the time of the writing of this article, not included in the SNS 2 distribution. The expected availability of on-line development tools is early 2002.
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