ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Scott Sweeny <scott.sweeny@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/06/2014 12:19 PM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> That's a topic that has been discussed between different groups of
> people recently, on merge requests [1] and bug reports, and it feels
> like we should have the discussion on a common place/together, to decide
> what is best, and all do the same thing.
> 
> Summary of the issue:
> - in unity8 we use the greeter as a lock screen
> - we want to have informations from the users available on the lock
> screen ("currently playing song" for example)
> - we need a way to get those informations from the session to the greeter
> 
> We are currently using accountsservice to store "static" informations
> (e.g the background image for the user), that's needed because the user
> might not be logged/the directory not available to get the information
> otherwise. The case we are speaking about there is different and
> concerns "dynamic" informations (e.g the song currently playing in the
> user sessions)
> 
> We have some solutions which have been suggested:
> 
> 1. using accountsservice there as well, maybe adding support for
> "volatile" informations which wouldn't get store.
> 
> That's the first suggestion made and some people started work using that
> approach. It feels suboptimal though, since it involves making 2 running
> processes talk by using a third process as proxy (which was not designed
> for that usecase).
> 
> 
> We discussed it a bit on #ubuntu-desktop and came with those possible
> solutions as well
> 
> 
> 2. get lightdm to connect to the user-session bus and send back selected
> informations to the greeter.
> 
> That seems like the most flexible/powerful solution, giving access to
> the user session might be a concern for security though.
> 
> 
> 3. having a subdirectory in the user's XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, which is visible
> to the greter via a privileged protocol in lightdm (lightdm opening
> files and sending content, or using fds are possible options)
> 
> that should do the job, be easy enough and not risk exposing too much
> from the user session
> 
> 
> Robert, what do you think of 2 and 3 from a lightdm perspective? Would
> you be happy to add support for one of those?
> 
> 
> Everyone, I've you have comments or extra ideas, feedback is welcome ;-)
> 
> Cheers,
> Sebastien Bacher
> 
> 
> [1]
> https://code.launchpad.net/~ted/indicator-sound/account-service-support/+merge/205891

One thing I'd like to see is some (perhaps limited) interaction with a
user's apps.

For example, let's say I'm out grocery shopping and I have my list in
the shopping app on my phone. I don't want to have to unlock the screen
every time I put an item in my cart, whether it's to tick off that item
or to see what's next in the list. At the very least I'd like a way to
display the list on the greeter screen. Ideally there would be some way
to check off items as I go.

I can imagine that this would be a nightmare from a design perspective
but as a utilitarian feature it would be really nice to have. :)

Cheers,
~Scott

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