Re: empathy integration with the desktop

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 30/03/11 00:07, Danielle Madeley wrote:
> It's very important here to distinguish between Telepathy as a service
> and Empathy which is providing the views of that service.

The end user doesn't care.

In the end, as a user, I would expect my status to be the same as I left 
it when logging in again. If I was busy, I am busy again and 
automatically signed in with that state. If don't want to be online (due 
to a weekend or some other reason), I can set my status to unavailable 
(either on Friday night before turning off my machine or Saturday 
morning should I turn it on again). In the case where people really 
don't want to be automatically online each time they start up their 
computer, they can opt for being unavailable initially.

In any case, having to run a process, which presents a list of contacts 
(which is not really too useful most of the time), really is an extra 
step I would like to avoid.

I am aware that people (even in our company) have different concepts of 
IM and how their state should be presented to the world, so this is 
something that needs to be configurable.

> On Tue, 2011-03-29 at 10:09 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
>
> > In order to go online and have the integrated stuff work in the
> > background you must first start a weirdly named application ("Empathy")
> > and then close(!) its window (this will not actually quit the app). This
> > causes you to go online and start using the integrated messaging
> > systems.
>
> The app is a view. We could make it quit the app. We could also make it
> not automatically put you offline (which it does at the moment when you
> quit). Really the only reason not to quit the app is to save having to
> load all that state again next time you want the roster (chat and video
> calls are in separate processes). Once again, the communications itself
> are a desktop service and separate to the app.

I actually would love to have proper integration into the shell for the 
view. Sometimes, I want to see if someone is online, so pressing some 
button somewhere or going to the top right :) and having a list which 
slides out, would be quite nice from my point of view. It would do 
nothing in cases where you're offline of course.

> > We could automatically launch empathy by default on login, but people
> > might not like to automatically go online as soon as they are at the
> > computer.
>
> To reiterate, not actually required. Just talk to mission control.
> Mission control will launch UI components on demand for
> requested/incoming channels.
>
> Summary: Telepathy is a communications service, Empathy is a view of
> that service. It's like how you don't have to launch nautilus to carry
> out file operations.

I answered this above.

Right now (not in GNOME shell and on Ubuntu), when I sign in, I have to 
start:

 - XChat (better IRC support sorry)
 - Empathy (Jabber, ICQ, GMail, etc)
 - Skype (would love to have this in Empathy)

I would prefer to not have to do any of that.

--
Regards,
Martyn