Re: Apple wireless keyboard

Hi Phil,

On Apr 24, 2008, at 18:49, Phil Endecott wrote:
>>> - Running hcitool scan to get the keyboard address (which I've now
>>> written on the back)
>>> - Running hidd --connect <addr> and typing 1234RET on the keyboard
>>
>> Both of these are fine but instead of using hidd you'd use the  
>> Connect
>> method that the input service provides (I think there's an example of
>> that too in the wiki).
>
> Hmm.  So rather than running "hcitool scan" and "hidd --conect  
> <addr>",
> I have to write a few lines of python (a language I've never used) to
> communicate over dbus (a protocol that I've never used) to this "input
> service" thing?  If that's the case, then I can't say this looks like
> an improvement in usability.

If you take a look at the wiki page you'll see that this can be  
accomplished with a couple of dbus-send commands which isn't that  
different from using hcitool and hidd (though the parameter list to  
dbus-send is certainly longer compared to the legacy commands). On the  
other hand, this D-Bus interface is of course something that an end  
user should never see. Instead, his environment of choice (be it  
GNOME, KDE, or something else) should provide a proper UI to do all  
this, and a D-Bus interface is a much cleaner solution compared to  
e.g. a GUI calling the legacy command line tools whose parameter lists  
and outputs have never been defined as a stable API.

What is a valid criticism of the current situation though is that  
compared to the legacy command line tools there doesn't exist as  
simple (or simpler) counterparts for the D-Bus API. This is mostly  
because using dbus-send or hacking together a quick python scrip  
hasn't been that big of a trouble for developers. However, while it is  
the responsibility of the different GUI environments to provide a  
proper GUI for using BlueZ (accessing it's D-Bus API) I do agree that  
BlueZ should continue providing easy to use command line tools for the  
D-Bus API's and hopefully there will be improvement in this area in  
the future.

Johan

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