UI overhaul

[Martin Klapetek]

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 11:48 PM, Sam Hewitt <hewittsamuel at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'll offer my apologies then, miscommunication has definitely occurred
> which I've been involved in; I just volunteered some assistance and drew a
> quick mock-up of some ideas.


Thanks, I'm more than happy to continue working with you. So let's put this
behind and focus on the work at hand.


>
> To address your points/questions/concerns:
>
> I (like to think I) understand the POV of developers -I do some
> rudimentary (an overstatement) development- given the code does limit
> design in a way.
>
> The icons right of the entry box are indeed for emoticons and an "attach
> file" icon -which I would agree isn't necessary given not all protocols
> under telepathy support file transfer.
>

We actually had an emoticon button with a full formatting toolbar, which
was completely killed this week. I was thinking about readding the emoticon
button and I think that putting it next to the text input would be good.

<snip>

 - search always enabled in the chat part
>
> The search was meant to be a contact list search for the ultra-popular
> users, not a search through the backlog for the chat history.
>

Here the search would be a bit confusing, because it sits on top of the
chatting area, so it would imply that it will search through the chat
rather than the list. Also keep in mind that the chat have a search of its
own. Maybe if the search was moved down to the chat toolbar (as there's
empty space right below it) for searching the chat and the searching field
for contact list could be moved to the left?


>
>
- "if you're in a chat, do you want to see all your contacts"?
>
> - If the only way to start a chat was via the contact list, I'd agree. If
> we were completely standalone I'd agree.
>
> I agree with this, I don't want to see them; I understand the logic of a
> single window mode but I'm not a fan -contrary to the vehement of others.
>
> - 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.
>
> If one were to consider the vertical list in my mock-up to be simply for
> all active chats, and not a complete list of contacts, then it would be
> more cohesive with the ideas in motion. ;)
>

I'm thinking what if you have only two or three opened chats? Then you have
lots of wasted space on the side of the chat ui; imagine your window is
500px tall and each contact row takes 30px, that means 400px of grayspace.

Also I really like the simplification of the contact list toolbar and I'm
happy to implement it. We most certainly don't need all those buttons to be
there (I think the only buttons having a real value in there is the "show
offline contacts" and "find contact").

-- 
Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
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