Online Accounts panel for 3.2

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hey,

One of the things I'm looking at doing for 3.2 is the Web Accounts panel:

 http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointOne/Features/Sharing
 http://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Profile

I sat down last week with one of the designers, Jon McCann, and we
came up with what we both think is a really nice user experience. It
is described in [1] for now - will move to the wiki soon.

Implementation-wise, I can see this as a very minimal daemon / library
that sits below libsocialweb, Telepathy, e-d-s and other APIs (e.g.
these libraries/frameworks would use this new framework) that is
dealing data online accounts. This daemon / library would

 a. have a notion of "source types"
   - email source
   - calendar source
   - chat source
   - photos source
   - contacts source
   - ...

 b. have a notion of providers that can be added removed by the
   end user
   - Google (for accounts at google.com and Apps For Your Domain)
   - Yahoo/Flickr
   - Exchange
   - Facebook
   - ...

 c. provide a concrete list of providers and what sources the
    instance of the provider supports. For example, for my setup, I
    would have the following

   - zeuthen gmail com (an instance of the Google data provider)
     - Mail (email source)
     - Contacts (contacts source)
     - Calendar (calendar source)
     - Chat (chat source)
   - david fubar dk  (an instance of the Google data provider)
     - (works because fubar.dk is using Google Apps For Your Domain)
     - Mail (email source)
   - dzeuthen yahoo com (an instance of the Yahoo! data provider)
     - Flickr! (photos source)
     - (I specifically unchecked mail here because I don't want
        the spam that is in that email account that I never use)
   - davidz25 (an instance of the Facebook data provider)
     - Messages (email source)
     - Events (calendar source)

The information in c. would map exactly to what the "Web Accounts" UI
would display:

 +------------------------------------------------------------------+
 | All Settings                                                     |
 +------------------------------------------------------------------+
 | +-------------------------------+  Google Account                |
 | | [Go] zeuthen gmail com        |                                |
 | | [Go] david fubar dk       (!) |  Username: david____________   |
 | | [Y!] dzeuthen yahoo com       |  Domain:   fubar.dk_________   |
 | | [Fb] davidz25                 |                                |
 | |                               |  Use this account for:         |
 | |                               |                                |
 | |                               |      [ON  ] Mail               |
 | |                               |      [ OFF] Chat               |
 | |                               |      [ OFF] Contacts           |
 | |                               |      [ OFF] Calendar           |
 | |                               |                                |
 | +-------------------------------+ (!) Authorization expired.     |
 | | [+] [-]                       |     Please login again.        |
 | +-------------------------------+                        [Login] |
 +------------------------------------------------------------------+

This "screenshot" shows an example where the david fubar dk account
needs attention (suppose that the password has been changed from
another system). In this case, I think the desktop would show the user
a notification saying "The account david fubar dk needs your
attention" and upon clicking on it, the user is taking to the
control-center pane above.

This daemon/library thing, let's call it GOA (Gnome Online Accounts),
would _not_ be a mechanism to access any of these services. But it
would provide e.g. libsocialweb, telepathy, e-d-s and so on with
either the username/password combo or the OAuth token, whatever is
appropriate.

I would imagine Telepathy/Empathy to use GOA to get the Chat accounts
that is configured in GOA (in the above example, it would be Google
Talk from zeuthen gmail com and Facebook Chat for davidz25). I would
use an Empathy specific preferences window (not appearing in
gnome-control-center I think) to add e.g. my ICQ account.

There are of course security / implementation considerations
(password/auth token hygiene, should we treat the desktop like it's
not a single security context when it really is?) here - all of that
comes next.

Technically, I'm proposing that we add a GOA module with

 - a daemon, goad, that implements the org.gnome.OnlineAccounts interface
   on a well-known object /org/gnome/OnlineAccounts and owns the well-known
   name org.gnome.OnlineAccounts (all this is on the session bus).

   Additionally, this daemon would notify the user if attention is
   needed (e.g. reauth) using org.freedesktop.Notificatins / libnotify.

 - a library, libgoa-1.0, that is used to speak to goad (but an app can
   also just use the D-Bus interface if it wants to). This library is what
   libraries/frameworks can use to get the information stored in goa. It
   would be a classic GObject-ish library providing both sync and async
   access to the data. It would also be introspectable so it's usable from
   e.g. Python or gjs.

 - a control-center panel to configure GOA

 - initially GOA will know about the following source types
    - mail
    - contacts
    - calendars
    - chat

 - initially GOA will have support for a couple of online providers (Google,
   Yahoo! comes to mind) as well as "generic servers" (initially, say email
   servers (IMAP/SMTP) and iCal/Jabber servers).

Once this is in place, apps like Evolution and libraries like
libsocialweb can start using this. FWIW, I'm planning to use this for
the GNOME Shell calendar drop-down so the shell can easily show events
from my zeuthen gmail com calendar (configured in GOA) without
involving Evolution (I've got most of that code written already - all
I need is a way to actually get the accounts to use instead of me
hard-coding it.)

Timing-wise, I'm not sure how it's going to work - I can have goa
ready somewhat soon (it's actually a rather simple daemon/library) but
I'm not sure if that's enough time for everyone to use it for 3.2...

There's a bit of overlap with other things here so that's why I'm
starting this discussion on desktop-devel-list now. I'm pretty
convinced that we need something really low-level and centralized so
e.g. you don't have to type in your Google password 3+ times (as is
the case for me today)... and I'm also pretty convinced it has to be a
GNOME project because the set of source types we offer greatly depends
on whether the GNOME app(s) in question supports that source (e.g. no
point in showing an "Events" switch for your Facebook account if your
calendar app don't know how to use it).

Anyway, lots of information in this mail - sorry about it being so long!

Thanks,
David

[1] : Basically, it would be ideal if the workflow was something
like

 - User presses "Add Account" in the control panel

 - User selects "Google Account" and enters his identity

 - User authenticates (using OAuth e.g. in the browser and possibly
  using CAPTCHAs and possible two-factor auth cf.

  http://tech.icrontic.com/news/how-to-enable-two-factor-authentication-on-your-google-account

  (For extra credit we only launch a browser instance if we really
   need it. I think Google at least supports a "Mobile Device" profile
   that does this at least for CAPTCHAs.)

 - User toggles, using GtkSwitch-like UI, what parts of this Google
   Account instance that he wants to use, e.g. [2]

    [ON   ] GMail
    [ON   ] Contacts
    [ON   ] Calendar
    [ON   ] Google Talk
    [  OFF] Picassa

 - If you later need to re-authenticate (just like the GMail web
   interface often makes you log in again) then we should somehow
   show a notification in GNOME Shell that directs the user to the
   system settings panel (see below)

Of course, this should work with more than your Google Account. If you
use your Yahoo! account, it would look like this

    [  OFF] Yahoo! Mail
    [ON   ] Flickr

We'd probably also want it to work with "generic services", e.g. have
a way to add unbranded IMAP/SMTP/LDAP/iCAL/Jabber servers. Note also
how the branded services (Google, Yahoo!) uses branded names Picassa
and Flickr instead of the generic "Photo Service". Note also that you
can have multiple instances of the same type - e.g. I'd have both
david fubar dk and zeuthen gmail com as Google Accounts. But I'd only
use Mail for the david fubar dk one - I don't want my calendar app to
show the david fubar dk calendar because I don't use it. Similarly, I
don't want to see my dzeuthen yahoo com mail because it only has spam
in it. So that's why there are GtkSwitch for turning services on and
off...

[2] : Please don't get too worked up about me mentioning GtkSwitch -
it's not the point. If using check-boxes is better, we'll just do
that!