Timekpr-nExT

Possibility of becoming part of GNOME's Parental Control for Screen Time?

Asked by Anthony Fok

Hello!

As you probably may know, GNOME 3.36 begins having some form of parental control feature:

    This New GNOME 3.36 “Gresik” Adds Parental Control Feature And More
    https://fossbytes.com/new-gnome-3-36-gresik-adds-parental-control-feature/

And there was a GUADEC talk about it on July 23, 2020:

    https://events.gnome.org/event/1/timetable/#20200723

    Parental controls in GNOME

    GNOME 3.36 was the first release containing a new parental controls feature upstreamed from Endless OS.
    What are parental controls, and what do they do in GNOME at the moment?
    How can I integrate my app with parental controls? What features are planned for the future?
    This talk will answer those questions.

    15:00 - 15:25
    Presenter
    Philip Withnall

The slides and presentation notes for his talk are available at

    https://events.gnome.org/event/1/contributions/78/

    https://events.gnome.org/event/1/contributions/78/attachments/11/28/presentation.pdf
    https://events.gnome.org/event/1/contributions/78/attachments/11/29/presentation_notes.pdf

Philip notes in his talk that Screen Time feature has yet to be implemented,
and invites other developers for contribution.
It would be great if Timekpr-nExT could become the official implementation of GNOME Screen time in the future! :-)

Many thanks!

Anthony Fok

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Timekpr-nExT Edit question
Assignee:
Eduards Bezverhijs Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Adrianvg (adrianvg) said : 		#1

That sounds like a great idea!

Revision history for this message
MTiVi (mtivi) said : 		#2

Great idea.

Revision history for this message
Eduards Bezverhijs (mjasnik) said : 		#3

I began to develop Timekpr-nExT to be compatible to as much as DEs available as I originally stated that in timekpr-revived project. I began to develop it in Unity and my family used Unity until it sort of ended, by that time I already knew that Gnome 3 was not our future DE for sure, so I just kept Timekpr-nExT DE agnostic.
Now I use KDE and none of my family members needs parental controls anymore :)

The thing that bothers me is that Gnome 3 is going to deprecate the system notification area altogether, for now an extension is sufficient, but I'm not sure for how long.
From Timekpr-nExT POV, that icon in system notification area is on the same importance level as, say, battery indicator - when time ends, computer is not going to be available.
I have not searched much, but the replacement which was suggested (actionable notifications) does not exactly suit Timekpr-nExT.

Another, probably a small discrepancy, is that in general Gnome cuts features, while I implement them because users ask for them :)
I don't think Gnome team would like too much options in parental controls, because not only it looks complicated it actually complicates things, however this is the only way to give tailored experience for users.

At least now, I don't have an incentive to leave the rest and work on Gnome, however I have made Timekpr-nExT functionality available via DBUS. There are actual integration possibilities and Timekpr-nExT is almost fully controllable via DBUS - client and administration applications (even console application) communicates with daemon using DBUS integration.
I'm not sure that my daemon is up to high integration standards, but that can be adjusted.

So in short, I'll still will maintain compatibility to other DEs, but if Gnome would like to use Timekpr-nExT daemon with custom / simpler GUI, that's no problem, please contact me and let's have a discussion whether that's even feasible, how it will actually look and work.

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