Review Request: Make default presence variants not bold, use italic font to visually distinguish special presence variants.

Tue Jun 26 17:53:18 UTC 2012

> On June 25, 2012, 11:48 a.m., Martin Klapetek wrote:
> > First of all thanks for a perfect review request! That's how they all should be done ;)
> > 
> > As for the change - I'm not in favor. Truth is that the bold font looks bad, but the italics looks a bit worse for my eyes. I'd like to do two things here - Nikita, please add Usability group in the review groups. To all others - try brainstorming some ideas here how we can separate these (do we need it at all?).
> 
> Kai Uwe Broulik wrote:
>     As far as I can tell the custom presence messages still include a status such as "Away" or "Busy"?
>     So we could add a custom delegate to the combobox to have it in two-rows. A bigger icon on the left and the generic term as heading and if available a custom subtitle below it. Similar to e.g. Plasma does for the Wallpaper Plugin.
>     See here: http://privat.broulik.de/plasmacustomdelegate.png
>     I think in this example the bold font doesn’t look bad at all. It just looks out of place if the font size is the regular dialog font size.
> 
> Martin Klapetek wrote:
>     That looks good, thanks for the idea!
>     
>     > the custom presence messages still include a status such as "Away" or "Busy"
>     
>     Nope, the "Away", "Busy" etc is replaced by the custom presence message itself, see the "After" screenshot above.
>     
>     > So we could add a custom delegate to the combobox to have it in two-rows
>     
>     I think this would be really nice. Anyone interested in doing a mockup/stealing that code and putting presences in it?
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     > http://privat.broulik.de/plasmacustomdelegate.png
>     
>     Isn't the icon good enough for that?
>     
>     What will be on the first row and what will be on the second?
>     
>     If no custom message means no second row, then i don't like if by default (with no custom presences) there would be only huge 2-row variants with big icons and empty second rows.
>     That's just wrong.
> 
> Martin Klapetek wrote:
>     First row would always be the presence name, second the presence message (if present). I'll do a mockup tomorrow so we can see how it would look like. Might turn out it's not good at all ;)
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     This is what i mean: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/06/25/status0.png (based on the image above).
>     
>     Also, that example has bad rowsize: the row height is about 60px.
>     That will be around 480px high dropdown select, with the default number of statuses (6 + 2 special).
>     4 custom presences would make that 720px and that won't fit nicely in 1366x768 (don't forget about window headers, the panel, etc.), which is common for 12" notebooks.
>     That would mean another scrollbar in a place which works perfectly without a scrollbar. I don't like it.
>     
>     Yes, it can be made smaller that on the original (mockup: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/06/25/status1.png), but that would still look too empty if no special presences are set.
>     And the status icons are quite simple, having big icons with little visual differences (mostly in color) doesn't look very good to me.
>     Maybe, collapse them to single-row, if there is no custom presences?
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     Fixed link: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/06/25/status1.png
> 
> Martin Klapetek wrote:
>     Nice work! Thanks a lot.
>     
>     I agree with most of your arguments. As such, it wouldn't be too good.
>     
>     Here's a question - Do we actually need to visually separate those things?
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     There is a larger question: is there a need in unchangable «default» statuses with no presence message?
>     Look how it's handeled in kopete.
>     
>     In short, the default statuses are also editable, so there is completely no need to separate them from custom statuses.
>     And the special entries are separated using a horizontal splitter line.
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     That allows, for example, to have only one «away» status with custom presence message.
>     That's not allowed by ktp, the only way to have a custom «away» presence message is to have at least two «away» statuses.
> 
> Bjoern Balazs wrote:
>     Sorry for the possibly stupid question: What are the two states that get visually separated by the two fonts? I concluded 'default' vs. 'personal' statuses - is that correct?
> 
> Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
>     I agree the bold font is too heavy, but I actually believe there is no real need to distinguish between custom and default statuses. I would just use the regular font for all status texts.
>     
>     Slightly off-topic: the left column looks crowded IMO, because the icons are all stuck to each others. I think it would look much nicer if the row height were slightly increased so that there are 2 or 3 pixels between the status icons.
> 
> David Edmundson wrote:
>     Keeping offtopic discussion separate at: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302560
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
>     > I actually believe there is no real need to distinguish between custom and default statuses. I would just use the regular font for all status texts.
>     
>     True. It's probably a bad idea to even have such thing as unchangable default statuses. In kopete, default statuses can be changed or deleted.
>     
>     The other thing that is different in kopete is that status names and presence messages are separated. The names are shown to the user in the status selector, and the presence messages are used by the protocol. For example, there can be a short-named status with a long presence message.

Thanks Aurélien for your notes.

Bjoern - yes, that's correct. The default ones are simply presences with no status message, the personal ones are presences carrying a presence message, which gets displayed to your contacts as your status.

As for Kopete - I find it quite confusing. You never know what actually what your presence message is unless you either open the presence manager or the edit message window. You also can't easily unset the presence message, the only way is one of those mentioned above, which is slow and not nice. We're doing way better job already imho and I'm considering removing the default presence when you set your own message. KTp team, what's your take on this?

- Martin

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On June 25, 2012, 7:50 p.m., Nikita Skovoroda wrote:
> 
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/105348/
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> 
> (Updated June 25, 2012, 7:50 p.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for Telepathy and KDE Usability.
> 
> 
> Description
> -------
> 
> The bold font looks bad, especially if there is no custom presences (then almost all variants are bold).
> 
> Changes done by the patch:
> 1) global-presence-chooser.cpp — make special presences italic.
> 2) presence-model.cpp — make presences without status message not bold.
> 3) presence-model.cpp — make presences with status message italic.
> 
> This replaces «normal» font with «italic», and «bold» with «normal» in the presence shooser.
> 
> Looks better to me.
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   global-presence-chooser.cpp 6729f51 
>   presence-model.cpp 72bfc3d 
> 
> Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/105348/diff/
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> Does not break anything. The result is on the screenshots.
> 
> This does not break visual separation of different status groups, when there are a lot of custom presences (the bold entries separated them) — they can be easily distingushed thanks to the icons.
> 
> 
> Screenshots
> -----------
> 
> Before
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/105348/s/608/
> After
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/105348/s/609/
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Nikita Skovoroda
> 
>

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