I understand the point about trying to stick to intents which have been documented by their developers.
The problem is, even a well-intentioned but busy developer may simply not get round to writing that documentation. The system applications are a great example of that effect. At least, with a discovery API, we could find out what the things were in some reliable way. We'd also have a better chance of understanding why our intents failed when they did. Right now, I sometimes feel like I'm on a random hunt for a magic string. It is the single most frustrating thing about developing for Android. Do you think there's any chance one will appear in a future version ? Or, can you think of any way to acheive the effect in the current version ? I had a vague idea about feeding generalities to PackageManager.queryIntentActivities(), but I have not found a way to make that work. Thanks, Richard On Jan 30, 8:31 pm, Dianne Hackborn <hack...@android.com> wrote: > You shouldn't just look at what intents an app happens to use: unless > someone publishes official protocols, those should be considered private. > Unless an app developer is explicitly maintaining them, they could change > their app arbitrarily and break someone using those implementation details. > > And Amazon MP3 app is owned by amazon, who just happened to have it > installed on the G1. It is not part of the platform, and so they would need > to document and maintain whatever intent protocols they want to publish. > > Finally, yes, we need to do a better job at defining official protocols for > the system applications. This is something that got dropped in the push to > get the initial full product out. > > > > On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 11:48 AM, jarkman <jark...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Peter - I agree completely. OpenIntents is a great idea, but it > > doesn't fix my problem either. > > > The strangeness is not just limited to the lack of a discovery API. > > There's also a peculiar lack of documentation on what the built-in > > apps can do, leaving us wasting a lot of time poking about making up > > intents by experiment. > > > My hope is that both of these - intent discovery APIs and better docs > > on the existing intents - are in the plan, just not done yet. > > > Richard > > > On Jan 30, 5:29 pm, Peter Jeffe <pje...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Jan 30, 10:45 am, Peli <peli0...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > > > For this reason, we have created the OpenIntents intents registry: > >http://www.openintents.org/en/http://www.openintents.org/en/intentstable > > > > > Even if there is a way to find all intents supported by an > > > > application, this will not tell you what kind of extras are supported > > > > or required or which result (if at all) is returned. > > > > I think your site is great Peli, I agree with your reasoning and > > > applaud your efforts. Unfortunately in this case I'm interested in > > > invoking the Amazon MP3 app, and no one has registered it on > > > OpenIntents, so I was trying to discover anything I could about it. > > > > I think it is very strange that Android has this nice concept of apps > > > registering the services that they provide, but there's no means for > > > other apps to discover what services are provided. Is it just me, or > > > does anyone else think this really limits the usefulness of this > > > feature? > > > > -- Peter > > -- > Dianne Hackborn > Android framework engineer > hack...@android.com > > Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to > provide private support. All such questions should be posted on public > forums, where I and others can see and answer them. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
