Respond directly to incoming chats

[David Edmundson]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Lasath Fernando <mail at lasath.org> wrote:
> Hey All,
>
> A few minutes ago on IRC, we came up with an awesome Idea. To replace
> the Knotification that pops up on an incoming message with a widget,
> that allows you to respond directly from it. A bit like GNOME does
> atm.
> http://lxnews.org/2011/01/08/gnome-shell-notifications-explained/
>
> I was told to start a thread in the ML rather than just starting work
> on it, so here I am.
>
> PS: Here's a log of our chat
> http://paste.kde.org/94933/
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Lasath
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>

On the technical side, I think what we want is to make a Plasma
Dataengine that acts as a Text Channel Observer. I can guide Lasath
through this - should be super easy thanks to the new
SimpleMessageObserver class.

The immediate difficulty with this is that it will only work when the
(normal) TextUi is active as this acts as the handler. As soon as you
close the chat window, the channel would close and you can't reply to
the message.
Also I'm not 100% sure on whether a textChannel observer can send
messages. The documentation doesn't say either way.

Maybe it should be a handler, that would solve these issues, but then
it will get into 'fights' with the normal Text UI as to which one
takes the chat initially, and prevent us from ever running both
simultaneously for a channel, which we would still need if we are
using it for notifications.

I wonder how Gnome 3 works.

We also have the minor problem that it becomes now a lot harder to
suppress notifications if you already have the TextUI as the active
window, though we can deal with that when the time comes.

Discuss.