[Chandler-dev] Proposal/Call for volunteers/Brain dump: Showing reminders when Chandler isn't running

[Reid Ellis]

On Jul 25, 2006, at 19:20, Grant Baillie wrote:
> On 5 Jul, 2006, at 21:46, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>> At 06:08 PM 7/5/2006 -0700, Grant Baillie wrote:
>>> One commonly found Calendar feature that we'd like to implement  
>>> is the ability to have reminder dialogs for events be displayed even
>>> when the Chandler GUI isn't visible (see https://  
>>> bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5407).
>>>
>>> Presumably, this would be something users could turn on and off,  
>>> lest we be accused of propagating some kind of CPU-hogging  
>>> virus :). It's
>>> unlikely we'll have time to do this in the α4 time frame, but  
>>> I'd like to request comments and/or propose some ideas for how we  
>>> could
>>> get this done.
>>>
>>> Also, since I'm somewhat of a Mac guy, and solving the issue will  
>>> probably require different behaviours on Windows & Linux, it  
>>> would be
>>> good to enlist the help of people who know the other platforms  
>>> well. For instance, there may be OS-specific services that I'm  
>>> not aware of
>>> that could be helpful here. The main technical stumbling block  
>>> that I see is one that probably has a platform-specific answer:
>>>
>>> +++ How do we make sure that some kind of background process or  
>>> app runs whenever the user is logged in?
>>
>> Have you considered just using the OS's scheduling facilities to  
>> run things when they're actually scheduled?  That way, the program  
>> wouldn't need to run all the time.
>
> On Unix/Mac, the only thing I could think of was cron, and that's  
> not so easy to use programmatically. Did you have particular  
> facilities in mind?

On the Mac you would use a launch daemon:
	http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/ 
BPSystemStartup/Articles/DesigningDaemons.html

Reid