GNOME Intentions and Kolibri
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Andy Holmes: Best Intentions
This is going to be a bit of a sporadic blog post covering XDG Intents, GSoC and few other updates from GNOME goings on.
XDG Intents
Most end-user platforms have something they call an intent system or something approximating the idea. Implementations vary somewhat, but these often amount to a high-level desktop or application action coupled to a URI or mime-type. There examples of fancy URIs like
sms:555-1234?body=on%20my%20waythat can do intent-like things, but intents are higher-level, more purposeful and certainly not restricted to metadata shoehorned into a URI.I'm going to approach this like the original proposal by David Faure and the discussions that followed, by contrasting it with mime-types and then demonstrating what the files for some real-world use cases might look like.
The Landscape
Let's start with the mime-apps Specification. For desktop environments mime-types are, most of all, useful for associating content with applications that can consume it. Once you can do that, the very next thing you want is defaults and fallback priorities. Now can you double-click stuff to have your favourite application open it, or right-click to open it with another of your choice. Hooray.
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Dylan McCall: A technical overview of the Kolibri app for GNOME
This blog post has been floating around as a draft for several years. It eventually split off into a presentation at GUADEC 2022, titled Offline learning with GNOME and Kolibri (YouTube). In that presentation, Manuel Quiñones and I explained how Endless OS reaches a unique audience by providing Internet-optional learning resources, and we provided an overview of our work with Kolibri. This post goes into more detail about the technical implementation of the Kolibri desktop app for GNOME, and in particular how it integrates with Endless OS.