UI overhaul

[David Edmundson]

I think we've all got off on the wrong foot.

This all started on G+, so I'll post one of the comments from there.
"Just to burst the bubble, I am working with a few Blue Systems folks
to completely redesign KDE-Telepathy and I have the full design power,
so if it gets super sleek I'm to be blamed for.
NOTE: The current UI is terrible, so don't worry, I can't make it
worse ... no one can :D"

Firstly I think there's some miscommunication going on here. Whilst we
appreciate input, comments feedback that's quite a long way from
blindly agreeing to spend the next 3 months of our free time to coding
something from someone we've not heard of.
(also we're not all Blue Systems people)

Secondly, the last comment isn't the best way to join a team and a community :)

Now that's all been said, lets move on from that.

I like that you've done a mockup, you've got plenty of ideas I agree with.

>From a developer POV, it's far easier if we just focus on one thing at
a time. Otherwise it's quite overwhelming.

So breaking down all your ideas/differences:

- message count in the contact list

Totally agree. I'm working on this right now.

Quite like the lozenge idea, might go with this in the "full" view.

- contact list shows status message under the name

Our "full" view looks like this. In KTp we changed to the much more
compact view simply because of the large number of contacts people
have and responded to the feedback

- insert emoticon / send file next to send message box in chat area

With you on the insert emoticon. I think I'll do that.

Not so sure about the sending file (if that's what that icon is to
represent?). To me that's much more like the audio call, or video call
and belongs in the toolbar as it's not related to things appearing in
the chat.

Btw, what's the icon to the left of "audio call" in the toolbar?

 - search always enabled in the chat part

I don't search my backlog that often. I don't think it's that important?
(or is it for searching contacts?)

- change presence changed to a single icon

 - single window

The controversial one :)

If the only way to start a chat was via the contact list, I'd agree.
If we were completely standalone I'd agree. But we can start chats
from not only the contact list, but the chat plasmoid, the
contact-list plasmoid, incoming messages, krunner, homerun,
kaddressbook and kmail (pending on the last two),

We're in a situation where people have _huge_ contact lists, I have
over 300 (yeah, I'm popular!) so in IM clients we are moving away from
the old notion of wanting to have a browsable list, in essence, the
contact list is losing relevance as we start chats from other
applications where we're already interacting with that person.

So you've approached this as "from the contact list would you want to
see the chats?", whereas we're coming from "if you're in a chat, do
you want to see all your contacts"?

That said, I do want to try a vertical list on the text-ui rather than
the tabs for all your ongoing chats. I think that would be a good
experiment to do and test on a group of people.

 - name change

Situation summarised here.

http://community.kde.org/Real-Time_Communication_and_Collaboration/RepeatedDiscussions/Name#Current_Situation

Have I missed any change suggestions?

Regards

David