Presence menu

Martin Klapetek martin.klapetek at gmail.com
Thu May 12 13:27:01 CEST 2011


Hi all,

now that Shadeslayer is working on the presence menus, I have a couple ideas
on how to rework them. The main concept is to keep it as simple as possible
and to keep the ability to set a presence with as little clicks as
possible.

Based on Shadeslayer's work and KDE-Usability suggestions, I propose to make
a primary simple menu, which will list only presences Available, Busy, Away
and list of custom presences, like this:
/----------------------------------\
| O  Available                |
------------------------------------
| O Busy                       |
| O Away                      |
------------------------------------
| O Custom presence 1  |
| O Custom presence 2  |
...
| O Custom presence N  |
------------------------------------
| O Offline                     |
\----------------------------------/

And then there would be a second menu, which will list all available
presences, including DND, ExtAway etc. (this should be later done based on
supported presences by protocol). You could switch between those two menus
in the Settings menu. Just a simple switch - "Use simple presence menu" vs
"Use advanced presence menu".

Next idea in this menus is, that once you click the presence, it will turn
into KLineEdit so you can directly input a desired presence message, without
any dialog or new opened window. If there would be any text entered, it
would be included among the custom presences, but max N last presences
(N=5?). The problem is that if you do not wish to input a message. Of course
you can simply close the menu/click anywhere, but I'm thinking about some
autoclose feature - if you do not type in 1 (or 2) second, it will autoclose
itself without any presence message set.

Then we need the presence dialog Shadeslayer created, to put it somewhere.
I'm thinking about the presence menu, right above Offline, and it could say
"Manage presence messages...", here you could remove/add the presences.

Even with all this, I'd like to keep the AccountButton as a self-contained
component, so it could be simply reused by anyone who would need it. I'd
also propose some kind of API to add the custom presences. Let me explain -
we think with David, that we could really use a component, which would
monitor your presence and display connection errors in case that contact
list is not running. This could also be a place for presence plugins - for
example the "Currently playing.." presence message (Amarok team does not
want it in Amarok, we do not want it in contact list (obviously), so where
to put it?). So in other words, this daemon would be like a proxy for easy
status setting. You could even use it for example from Okular - "Currently
reading..." etc. But that's for a later discussion.

Let's discuss the presence menu first and let's all focus on the first
release :)

--Marty
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