Account Icon in KDE Telepathy

[Daniele E. Domenichelli]

Hello,

(I'm CC'ing the artists team because I'm interested in knowing their 
opinion as well.)


One of the features that we are still missing in KDE Telepathy is the 
possibility to set a custom icon to an account, useful to distinguish 
two accounts using the same protocol.

Kopete had this interesting feature that lets you pick any colour for 
the icon, and the "standard" icon for the protocol and then is rendered 
using that colour as an effect.
This is not possible for telepathy, because we don't have an icon-color 
property (perhaps we could try to have it directly in telepathy specs, 
but I'm not sure if this is a good idea and if they would accept it 
upstream), the only thing that we can do at the moment is just set a 
custom icon.

We could just let the user choose any icon, but in my opinion this is a 
little too much for the standard user because he probably don't want to 
be able to choose any icon, but wants just to be able to distinguish the 
accounts.

Therefore I'm thinking that we could have for each profile (for artists 
team a "profile" can be either a protocol like "jabber" or "msn", but 
also a special profile like "gtalk" or "facebook" that use the jabber 
protocol but have their own icon) one "official" icon named 
"im-<profile>" and 6 more icons named "im-<profile>-<xxx>" (with xxx = 
red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow). Then instead of using the 
standard icon chooser, we could have something like this [1] or [2]. 
(Perhaps we could add a "More" button to show the standard icon chooser).


Another possibility, is to have just one icon, save the colour by 
"appending" it to the icon name, and then "remove" it from the name and 
draw it using the effects. That seems to me a bit harder, because it 
requires to modify it in every place where the icons are used (even 
though for most of them we probably need just to modify the data() 
method from the account model).


Finally another way to do this could be to implement in KIcon some 
special syntax to apply automatically a colour as effect from the 
icon-name (for example something like "im-jabber#red" or "im-jabber#FF0000")


What do you think? Do you have any better idea?

Cheers,
  Daniele



[1]http://wstaw.org/m/2012/02/10/snapshot46.png
[2]http://wstaw.org/m/2012/02/10/snapshot47.png