Notices

Perhaps. Before people start using it

I would also remove the "-f". Unix piples FTW!

I can imagine using ssh/netcat to remotely pipe messages to torchio

Actually, now that I think about it, there probably are a few situations where files would provide more functionality. (In particular, if you wanted to display a particular message in a loop, the way that Lanterne can.) I'll go ahead and keep both options for now.

Yeah, I was doing a bit of that during testing. (I guess it's sort of the thing people were doing with espeak a while back...)

Now we need just another app from you reading the sent out light codes by the camera somehow and read it out via espeak

Thanks for all the fish (erm pasta)!

Forgive me for asking, but why, after Lanterne have you done this?

Well, three or four folks in the Lanterne thread asked for a command-line interface a couple of days ago, and I've been wanting to create a command-line Qt app for a while myself (just to see how best to do it). As it turned out, combining a graphical user interface and a command-line interface into one app is not at all easy (and the Qt folks make it hard on purpose), so I went ahead and created a separate app...

Quick reply...
Indeed, if you wish to control the flashlight from a batch script, it would be inconvenient to have gui of Lanterne starting up - even if it shuts down after executing the commands. And it would be fairly difficult to have both visible-gui and invisible-command-line packed in one app.
So, yes. Lanterne for manual signals, and Torchio for batch mode? Something like that. For example, if you want to read the incoming SMS messages by having the bright flashlight illuminate your surroundings with Morse code, torchio is brilliant.
After all, it's fairly difficult to manually control the coloured-led: if I remember correctly, MCE gives different led sequences for different types of events, never mind what the content of the event is.
I can imagine it. An SMS comes in. The mode is 'Silent-NoScreen'. The coloured led repeats, as usually, the blue-or-whatever led blinking until you notice it at last (a short break in a meeting?). Then, you open the camera-lens-cover, and red flashlight blinks in Morse code to tell you the content of SMS. The SMS is marked 'Read' as soon as you close the cover. If you weren't able to read the Morse code from first attempt, half-press the camera button to repeat the message. If you want to reply to SMS, full-press the camera button, and it will bring up the SMS-write interface to the sender of the received SMS.
It's just a possible exaple of what can be done. I am not even sure how to do it. It would be a handy extension of hildon-notifications, though. Along with espeak reading the notification text if the mode is 'General-NoScreen'.
Best wishes.
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Per aspera ad astra...

Is that a challenge? In that case, I accept! (It may take a while though, starting with coming up what kind of app this should be. Any ideas?)

Actually, it isn't _so_ hard to do; but, if you want to do that with Qt, you either have to live with your QApplication object starting up a gui in the background even when just used as command-line, or set up both a QApplication and a QCoreApplicaton in the main function, and parse through the command-line args _before_ you pass them to Qt in order to figure out which one to instantiate... Pretty annoying either way.

You could start with Orecchiette, including the dreaded daemon to record calls without bringing up GUI (but, other command line options would be great... I always liked very much - and I'm fond of - programs that have nice and usable GUI's, but with possibility of doing exactly the same (and more, if combined with shell scripts) via command line. I think I'm command-line worshiper, as I actually think every program should have that

/Estel