Re: Running an application more than once

In article <yzlabv54b0p.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
cstacy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote:

Gregory Weston <uce@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Addressing specifically the assumption that a user will be there to
respond to the dialog...

Please note, in my original message, I explained several different
ways that applications can be associated with each other, and only
one of them involved a dialog as you are suggesting. I have not
made the assumption that you claim: rather, it is but one solution
that is used in certain situations.

How does the facility that pops up this dialog know that it's relevant
to the current IPC attempt?


Problem 2: The need to initiate IPC in response to user action might not
occur in close temporal proximity to the user interaction that
stimulated it.

I think this means you're going to lanch a desktop app, have it do
something to another app that you already launched, and then walk
away for lunch because it takes a long time. (Perhaps you are
transcoding a bunch of videos or something.)

Note that with modern applications a user wouldn't need to walk away for
them to lose any sense of connectedness between some action they took
and the eventual attempt to initiate IPC. Work may be performed in the
background while the UI remains responsive. The user may even kick off
multiple "jobs" of the same type, and depending on the complexity of the
specific job they may progress at different rates. So if just as the
user initiates the 5th of a series of lengthy tasks and then the 4th one
- which they started 5 minutes ago - attempts an ambiguous IPC
connection, what's the interface that allows them to make an informed
decision about the target process?

Problem 3. The need to initiate IPC might not occur in response to local
user action at all.

You're saying that user-visible applications, running on someone's
Desktop, suddenly start responding to AppleEvents from the network,
without the user's awareness that this is happenning? He's not in
control of the app on the master machine, nor in control of the target
app running on his own machine?

Yep. I'm saying that an application may execute code in response to a
remote event.


Problem 4. The target process(es) might not be interactive/visible.
There's no way for the user to predict reliably when the dialog might
appear even if it is an immediate response to a specific action on their
part (thus my characterization as spontaneous and irregular).

If the target process is not interactive or visible, how did the user
deliberately launch more than one of them? It sounds like he didn't
even launch one of them!

If you're like most people, most of the active processes on your machine
right now are non-interactive. Most of those are not launched as a
result of user intent, but some are and regardless they may be
addressable by IPC.


Can you give some specific examples of Problem 3 and 4, naming the
applications and showing how this problem happens? I am sure we
can find a solution.

I have an app sitting on my machine that displays and logs the caller ID
information for incoming calls. It can also be configured to execute any
number of AppleScripts to perform arbitrary processing of each call
event. What happens if a call comes in while I'm not sitting here and
the IPC request (to an app for which multiple launches are arguably
beneficial) is ambiguous?
.

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