Proposal of a crossdesktop interface to query several properties about the state-of-the-desktop

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

Hi Riccardo & all:

Well to be honest, I also thought about something similar to what you propose, 
but I never had the guts to talk about it :P From this point to the end of 
this message, I am in "dream mode":

What I had in mind is something very similar to what you propose but just with 
more information. 

So for a concrete example, imagine I'm writting a plasma applet that displays 
the music being played at the moment. I would query to an unnammed 
intermidiary: Music::currentlyPlaying(). The intermidiary would see if there 
is any application that implements that interface, and if so it would get the 
answer for each of those applications and return an array similar to this:

[
	"amarok" => [
		"song name" => "Purple Haze",
		"artist name" => "Jimmy Hendrix",
		"album name" => "Platinium Colection"
	]
}

(In this I had only amarok playing, but I could have also rythmbox and exile 
at the same time.

This way the applet wouldn't be amarok-dependent, not even KDE-dependent. And 
this is just an example, you could also imagine getting the playlist from 
pidgim or kopete or amsn, etc. I think that given DBUS as a common protocol, 
this is just one step more: standarizing the interfaces, and take advantage 
of them to the max.

Dream on,
      Eduardo Robles Elvira.