What should be in the contact list

[Daniele E. Domenichelli]

On 02/11/2011 02:18 PM, George Kiagiadakis wrote:
> My proposal is this: If the user has the presence plasmoid active on
> his desktop, adjust the contact list ui to show only contacts and no
> accounts or anything else. In this case, the contact list should also
> not minimize anywhere when closed, it should exit properly, plus it
> should not alter the status of the accounts when it is closed. But, in
> case the user has no presence plasmoid active, adjust the contact list
> to act as a traditional IM app, which means: show accounts and a way
> to set them online/offline, minimize to the tray instead of closing,
> set accounts offline when it is closed and offer options to start the
> text/call UIs so that the user can join chat rooms or call numbers
> through the contact list. Of course this could be all configurable,
> there is no point in restricting users if the application supports
> something, I am just talking about defaults here.


I'm a little scared of a behaviour that is based on the presence of
other applications and/or plasma applet... what if presence plasmoid is
removed/killed/uninstalled and plasma-desktop crashes (it always do)
while the contact list is running in "contact-only" mode? Of course we
could implement some DBus method and signals an switch the mode, but it
just sounds evil to me...

So, my proposal... what about having a single plasma applet that behaves
like Lancelot:

It has 2 modalities:
 1) Single button + popup with several categories
 2) One button per category and the user can choose which category to
    show

So the user can have just one button showing everything, or several
buttons showing just one category each and just the categories he is
interested in. He can also have several plasmoid in different positions
of the desktop...

Categories could be:

 - Accounts (presence, maybe with submenus showing contacts by account)
 - People/Persons/Contacts (choose your favourite name)
 - Places (chatrooms, etc.)
 - Actions/Applications (with reversed point of view... what do you
   want to do? Share a file? Chat or talk to someone (because you feel
   lonely)? Play chess? Ok, let's see who is online and supports it.

Pros:
 - Innovative and eventually extendible
 - Not cluttered interface
 - Behaviour is not modified by the presence of other applications
 - Recycle Launcelot code (actually I didn't even had a look at it)
 - Simple (the default button just have everything) but fully
   customizable

And of course:
 - Cool animations
 - Elegance
 - We can name the plasma applet from a Knight of the Round Table :D

Cons:
 - Monolithic app
 - Contact list app becomes a plasma applet
 - Contact list and everything else actually becomes just a popup menu
 - Cannot be used on a gnome desktop (but we are already depending on
   nepomuk, so do we really care?)

More Ideas:
 - We can use plasma runners for search and configure the search box to
   use only telepathy runners
 - We can use the bottom part of lancelot (the Lock/Leave/Switch
   section) for setting the global preferences
 - Can this be an idea for GSoC 2011?


This is just what came to my mind right now, so can you see any other
Pros and Cons? Comments?


Of course due to the nature of telepathy this doesn't need to have just
one contact list, so maybe we can start with a simple contact list and
this can be done in the future...

Cheers,
 Daniele