Re: Musings on the contacts user experience

[Jonathon Jongsma <jonathon quotidian org>]

On Fri, 2011-04-29 at 16:13 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> My main fears in a setup like this is:
> 
> * Conceptually a "chat" app needs to be running all the time when you're
> online (as you might get a message), but generally you don't want to see
> it all the time. With us not having a "good" solution to minimize, and
> not liking minimize-to-systray-icon we don't have a good way to
> represent this "running in background" state. The one way to fit this
> into the shell design is to just put the IM window on some other
> desktop, but I think that might still be a bit too visible.


This is not really true.  You can be online without having a chat
application (e.g. empathy) running.  The connection managers will run in
the background with no UI.  When a new chat message comes in,
mission-control will dispatch it to the correct application (starting
that application if necessary).  You just need something to tell
mission-control to go online (or away, or whatever other status you
want).  Right now this is handled by the empathy application, but it
could easily be something that is built into the shell.  In this setup
you have no issue with conceptual minimize issues.

jonner