Features/OnlineAccountsService

Feature Name

Online Accounts Service

Summary

Provides applications with credentials for user's online accounts listed on online.gnome.org or stored in GConf.

Owner

• Name: Marina Zhurakhinskaya

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 10
• Last updated: 09/18/08
• Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description

Online Accounts is a new DBus service available at org.gnome.OnlineAccounts that desktop applications can use to create and retrieve user's online accounts (such as Google, Twitter, etc.).

Online Accounts service

• stores online account information in GConf and passwords in GNOME Keyring
• gets the account information from online.gnome.org server if it is available, otherwise relies on GConf
• provides a dialog for adding and removing online accounts, as well as supplying passwords for existing accounts
• is currently used by Online Desktop's sidebar to get user's Google and Twitter accounts, but patches for other applications will be coming soon

The list of supported account types is stored on online.gnome.org server and is easy to expand.

Benefit to Fedora

• user only has to enter or update information for a particular account type once
• desktop applications do not need to do own GConf and GNOME Keyring manipulations
• desktop applications do not need to create a custom dialog
• new applications can be recommended based on online accounts added by the user

Scope

Done:

The Online Accounts DBus service is available at org.gnome.OnlineAccounts and can be used by the desktop applications to create and retrieve accounts with specific types.

The Online Accounts service stores account information in GConf and passwords in GNOME Keyring.

The Online Accounts service gets account information from the online.gnome.org server if it is available, otherwise just uses GConf.

The Online Accounts service is currently used by Bigboard to get user's Google and Twitter accounts.

Supported account types are stored on the server and the list is easy to expand.

A patch was created for Twitux to use the OnlineAccounts DBus service to obtain user Twitter accounts.

To do:

Will need to include the online-desktop package by default, and make sure that desktop-data-engine and web-login-driver are started when appropriate in the regular GNOME session.

Will need to figure out when the user is asked to sign in to online.gnome.org in the regular GNOME session. At the very least, we can have a link to sign in when the dialog for entering online accounts is opened up by an application.

Test Plan

Accounts entered by the user on online.gnome.org should be available to the desktop applications that request those accounts when the user signs in to online.gnome.org.

The user should still be able to add, remove, and supply credentials for online accounts when they are not signed in to online.gnome.org

User Experience

The users will only notice the change if an application they use switches to using the Online Accounts DBus service. In which case, the application can use the stock dialog pictured for getting the online account credentials. The user may also be offered to log in to online.gnome.org and modify their online accounts information there.

The dialog tab for providing account password, disabling, or removing an online account:

The dialog tab for adding a new online account for one of the supported account types:

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

Online Accounts service not used by any of the applications in the regular GNOME session.

Documentation

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/online-desktop-list/2008-May/msg00043.html

http://live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop/CreatingSidebarWidget

Release Notes

New feature, no upgrades necessary.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/OnlineAccountsService

---