What is the preferred way to handle opening items in Maemo 5? E.g. to tell the phone "Open this url" and have the device decide which app to open (probably a web browser) or "Show this JPG file" (and open an appropriate photo viewer).

I know that android works this way (where you simply say 'show this image using whatever app you think is correct'). I suspect, however, that maemo 5 requires i specify an app ('here, photo viewer, please show this jpg'. Or 'here, fennec, please show this url'). If thats the case, can somebody point me to documentation on how to do that?

These threads and blog posts should get you started:

http://maemo.org/community/maemo-dev...d_local_files/
http://maemo.org/community/maemo-dev...ser-fremantle/

http://blogs.gnome.org/tthurman/2009...e-n900-part-1/

The links to the mailing list archive for the above "forumified" threads:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...er/020528.html
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...er/020783.html

Edit: If you want a generic file/url opener, take a look at libhildonmime. Unfortunately it is still not documented. I think the source code repository lives here, which might be a good starting point looking for clues (or check for dependencies on libhildonmime and check out the source of relevant packages for examples).

ah, fantastic. That helps a bunch. Looks like hildonmime has no python bindings . The dbus stuff helps, I really wish there was a wiki page with a list of the dbus params for all the nokia provided services.