Re: Link dialog and Undo for linking

[Erick Pérez Castellanos <erick red gmail com>]

> The plan is to expose search in the way that it is going to be
> presented in the other GNOME 3 mockups. There is also a video that
> gives you an idea [0]. You can totally use a static search bar if you
> don't fancy tackling that yet though. :)


> Having thought about this topic over the Christmas break, I'm coming
> to the view that we need a bit of a rethink of our approach to
> linking. Currently, GNOME Contacts presents every persona (in libfolks
> speak) as a contact. This creates a number of issues:
> 
> 1. Some contact stores aren't writeable, leaving us in the unfortunate
> position of presenting contacts that cannot be changed
> 
> 2. GNOME Contacts could become flooded with personas from social
> networking sites
> 
> 3. It isn't clear where 'my contacts' are being stored
> 
> Another problem with the current linking design is that link
> suggestions are buried in a dialog, and will therefore typically not
> be discovered.
> 
> One way to deal with these problems is to make a distinction between
> 'my contacts' and 'other contacts'. My contacts are those contacts
> whose details I personally administer. They are recorded in a personal
> repository of contact data which I have control over. Other contacts
> are those contacts whose details only exist in other repositories of
> contact data. A contact who I only have details for in Twitter or
> Facebook does not belong to my contacts.
> 
> This distinction between my contacts and other contacts is quite
> common. Gmail has the concept of 'My Contacts' Android has something
> called 'All Contacts' (which roughly conforms to what I have described
> as 'other contacts'). I think it is useful, in that it is close to how
> people tend to think about their contact data.
> 
> There are a few ways in which we can organise GNOME Contacts around
> the distinction between my and other contacts:
> 
>  * The default persona store can be treated as 'my contacts'. The list
> of contacts presented by GNOME Contacts can be the contacts in the
> default store, with any personas that are linked to them displayed
> inline. Other contacts (personas that aren't in the default store and
> which aren't linked to a persona from the default store) can be
> displayed in search results as a separate category [1].

>  * Other contacts can be presented differently, and can have an option
> to link them to a contact in the default store [1].

>  * Use inline linking suggestions [2, 3]
> 
>  * On first run, if there is more than one online account capable of
> being the default store, ask which one to use [4]. If there is no
> online account for contacts, prompt the user to create one or to use
> the local address book [5].
> 
>  * If there are no contacts in the default store, prompt the user to
> either import contacts or change address books [6].
> 
>  * When linking, the contact selector should operate in two modes -
> one for linking to my contacts [7] and one for linking to other
> contacts [8]. When linking to my contacts, only other contacts should
> be displayed in the dialog, and vice versa.
> 
> Hope that makes sense. What do you think?

Here, I think it's everything pretty cooked up. I like the point of
having one central (default) store and letting the user select/handle
it, today that's kinda blurry.

Second, about the links dialog itself, there's one use case I'm not
seeing here:
Say I read ezine 'A' and I follow some journalist 'Z' of that ezine. If
I have it in my circles in G+ and follow him in twitter I would have to
instances of the same people in 'Other Contacts' category right. Why
don't use the link-to-other-contact dialog for linking these two ?

Finally, how about unlink contacts ?

I do really like where the project is heading. Thxs for the hard work
Allan.

Kind regards.