Telepathy Mission Control and Decibel Standardisation
George Wright is spending his internship over at collabora on coming up with a proposal for a freedesktop.org standard on high level functionality in Telepathy. Why is that necessary?
Decibel was developed to provide that high level API to realtime communication based on Telepathy. For some reasons or another this did not work out and we ended up doing Decibel without the full support of the Telepathy team. We got some really cool thing going with Decibel… and then a couple of weeks back Nokia released their set of APIs as used in their internet tablets. This Mission Control does somewhat overlap with Decibel in functionality. So all of a sudden we have two competing technologies with completely different APIs: The nightmare of developers having to write cross desktop applications.
George is now charged with the job of bringing the two implementations closer together. For that reason he has evaluated Decibel and Nokia’s Mission Control for the last couple of days and came up with a proposal. I am somewhat proud that he came up with something much closer to Decibel than to what Mission Control did! At the same time it does feel a bit strange to have somebody define something based on my APIs as ’standard’… never thought something like that would ever happen to me:-)