qole : i agree emelfm2 is overkill just to use as an app launcher, and yes it has its share of quirks... but god is it powerful

linuxauthor : you nailed it... i'd guess mainly its to enforce single instancing of applications. Any shim program would probably just allow multiple instances... user discretion would ensure you dont run out of memory by not shutting down old apps. Mplayer is easy though since exiting full screen can quit.

tso : afaik they only advocate hildon/dbus -> hildon/dbus and this is documented (in arguable clarity) as requiring changing codebase to support that callback. I am not familiar enough with dbus on regular distros to know if this is a proprietary implementation. I'd rather not be forced into this as only option for associations although i see possible benefits of such an interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism. Most existing source code that i have seen (which has or could be) ported to maemo doesn't support dbus messages.

Imagine how much better and versatile your device could be if you could associate these non dbus apps...

If someone can figure out how to successfully launch from cli sending just dbus messages / script files, then the possibility exists to replace the file manager with a different file manager which can do both (as opposed to middle-man shim). Or the middle-man could be reverse shim-scripts which convert the opposite direction (shell out cli which converts to dbus).