I'm very interested in staying connected to the outside world while playing Steam games. I'd love to be able to quickly peek at my email, or stay in touch with IM contacts outside Steam.
While it's easy to ask for an XMPP client, an even nicer thing would be to have an open API for creating windows, widgets and dealing with events inside the Steam overlay -- at the very least for the desktop UI, but preferably for BigPicture as well.
Since there is already a whole web browser inside Steam, which should already be properly sandboxed, it would probably make sense to expose this through the browser, allowing users to whitelist certain domains to access these bonus JS objects.
At the very least, better manipulation of browser windows, easier launching of web apps (through shortcuts in form of custom buttons) and better integration with the environment (e.g. HTML5 notifications) would do wonders for letting people write tools that reduce the amount of time people are alt-tabbing back into OS's desktop.
Or at least it'd help me -- because I really, really want to more easily stay in touch with my family and friends over XMPP. :-)
I'm very interested in staying connected to the outside world while playing Steam games. I'd love to be able to quickly peek at my email, or stay in touch with IM contacts outside Steam.
While it's easy to ask for an XMPP client, an even nicer thing would be to have an open API for creating windows, widgets and dealing with events inside the Steam overlay -- at the very least for the desktop UI, but preferably for BigPicture as well.
Since there is already a whole web browser inside Steam, which should already be properly sandboxed, it would probably make sense to expose this through the browser, allowing users to whitelist certain domains to access these bonus JS objects.
At the very least, better manipulation of browser windows, easier launching of web apps (through shortcuts in form of custom buttons) and better integration with the environment (e.g. HTML5 notifications) would do wonders for letting people write tools that reduce the amount of time people are alt-tabbing back into OS's desktop.
Or at least it'd help me -- because I really, really want to more easily stay in touch with my family and friends over XMPP. :-)