When I wrote collaboration into the View Slides activity I just copied the code from the base Read activity so I could copy an entire slideshow from one machine to another. That didn't work all that well, so now I'm considering something that I think is both more practical and a better use of collaboration. The idea is to have buddies that join a slideshow passively view a show being navigated by the master user, sort of like looking over someone's shoulder when he reads.
What I have in mind is this: 1). The View Slides user (who I will call the master user) offers to share his slideshow. 2). One or more buddies choose to join the slideshow. 3). At the time of joining the buddies are given a version of View Slides which has several things disabled. For instance, they cannot share the slideshow themselves, and they cannot navigate through the slideshow either. They will only see the current image being viewed by the master user, plus they will know what the current page number is and how many total pages there are in the show. 4). When the master user changes pages, he will send a message to all the buddies telling them the new page number, etc. and that will cause them to request a download of the current image from the master user. When this image is fully downloaded their program will display it and update the page number shown in the toolbar. The buddies always get the image from the master user, never from each other. 5). When a buddy resumes a shared session from his Journal he will rejoin the shared show in progress if it is still being shared. If it isn't he will see the last image he viewed, and the toolbar will show the total page count and the page number of that image. It occurred to me that the Chat activity must be doing something kind of like this, but I haven't been able to figure out the code in that Activity. It looks like pieces are missing and are perhaps inherited from the base Activity class. I'm hoping someone here can guide me to some tutorial, code samples, and the like to help me figure out how to write the collaboration code for my Activity. I've been looking for tutorials on Telepathy on the internet and haven't found anything that looks like what I need. Thanks, James Simmons _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel