What should be in the contact list

[David Edmundson]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 6:47 PM, Daniele E. Domenichelli <
daniele.domenichelli at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> KDE-Telepathy mailing list
> KDE-Telepathy at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-telepathy
>

We've all gone very off-topic from my original intentions of this thread.

I was concerned that we'd thrown Martin in to writing the contact list with
very little direction or plan of what we wanted for the /first/ release of
the contact list, and I wanted to address this.

Totally new massive designs (however awesome) aren't really helping in that
regard.

Can I ask that Daniele and George K write up their ideas on a wiki page
somewhere (Mailing list threads tend to get lost over time) under some sort
of brainstorm page. It seems apparent to me that at some point we do need to
have a big discussion and work out what we're actually aiming to achieve and
how. With lots of newer people in the project (including me) I'm not sure we
all have the same vision.

Back to "What we should do in the first release?":

We can develop "room selection" as a separate app, it simplifies development
of the contact list. A first release needn't be any more complex than
empathy's dialog.

I'm tempted to say the same for developing something to edit your
alias/personal information and stuff. It can then be moved to wherever the
hell people say it should go afterwards.

No-one has said anything about adding contacts, so I'm left to assume we're
all happy with that being in the contact list. I don't know what state this
is currently in, I gave it a try, it didn't work.

Dave
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