Google Developing Master API — Web Intents 86
GeneralSecretary writes "Google is developing an API to allow web apps to easily share information with various services. Quoting: 'Android OS addresses this problem with Intents, a facility for late run-time binding between components in the same or different applications. In the Intents system, the client application requests a generic action, e.g. share, and specifies the data to pass to the selected service application. The user is given a list of applications which have registered that they can handle the requested intent. The user-selected application is created in a new context and passed the data sent from the client, the format of which is predefined for each specific intent type. We are hard at work designing an analogous system for the web: Web Intents. This web platform API will provide the same benefits of Android Intents, but better suited for web application. ... As with Android, Web Intents documents an initial set of intent actions (edit, view, share, etc.) that likely cover the majority of use cases on the web today; however, as the web grows and sites provide more functionality, new intent actions will be added by services that document these intents, some more popular than others. To foster development and use of intents, we plan to create a site to browse existing intents and add new intents.'"
Re:Great (Score:3, Informative)
Yea, in the same way that following a specific ABI in your C magically tracks your users...
If you have Android, choose "Share" (Score:5, Informative)
Intents is one of the best and most powerful parts of the Android platform, and one that is often overlooked when comparing to iOS.
In pretty much any Android application under the sun, you can hit "Share" from a menu or button somewhere. When you do that, whatever data you have in that app posts a message to android saying "Hey, I want to share this (image/jpg or text/xml or application/octet-stream)... and any other application on the system that is registered to handle that intent's mime type will show up as something to share to.
This is what lets you share videos from anywhere on the phone not only to YouTube, but also to Picassa, DropBox, SMB, Email, or any other app that says they can handle videos or binary files.
It's a really powerful and flexable application cross-commnication system, that makes all kinds of otherwise disconnected third-party applications work together seemlessly for the user. For example, I can "Share" my PhotoStich images with my Dropbox, directly inside the application.... and none of the PhotoStitch or Dropbox developers had to talk to each other to make that happen.