Re: GNOME 3.2 ideas and plans

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 29/03/11 13:18, Guillaume Desmottes wrote:
> Hi Martyn,

Hi,

> Thanks for this very detailed list.

Just off the top of my head ;)

> Le mardi 22 mars 2011 à 18:58 +0000, Martyn Russell a écrit :
> > For me (and these are regressions since Gossip, possibly related to
> > cross protocol compatibility in places?):
> >
> > - Can't name favourite chatrooms so they have a hideous title in tabs
>
> Good catch. I opened https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646077
>
> > - Chat windows expand horizontally when typing a lot of text.
>
> That's actually a GTK+ bug:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587441

Oh? We fixed it in the UI in Gossip - perhaps you found another bug or 
we worked around it in the past. Either way, great! :)

> > - My nick constantly resets to my Jabber ID (previously the part before
> > '@' was at least used as a fallback).
>
> That's a nasty one. We recently fixed various place which could lead to
> this bug, so I'd be interested to know if you are still experiencing
> this issue with a recent Empathy and telepathy-mission-control.
> If you do, please comment on
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631730

Will try to find time to comment there, thanks for the bug number.

> > - Showing messages to me in the actual group chat window would be nice,
> > currently we just highlight the tab if we get a message directly, but
> > for historical purposes, I miss not seeing it when I scroll back up.
>
> You mean highlighting the message itself in the chat window?

Highlighting the line itself (or just my nick). For example, (quite 
often), I come back from lunch, I have 2 or 3 messages from different 
people in one channel or room. I need to scan myself and search for my 
name being mentioned. Instead, if the name was highlighted, it would be 
much quicker for the eye to spot.

> > - Showing the date on every message in group chat is irritating
> > especially when copy/pasting. Once per "block" or per 5 minutes would
> > make more sense. It would also reduce the UI noise.
>
> Good point; I opened https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646081

Great! :)

If you figure out how to concatenate connect/disconnect messages, let me 
know - that one was quite hard to figure out with Gossip. :)

For more context:

Imagine, you're in a room and someone has connection issues, if they 
reconnect 5 times, that's 10 messages. Really, you just want the last 
one or the first and last set. Either way, spamming the room/chat is 
horrible.

> > Other than that, UI wise, my eye notices things like:
> >
> > - Protocols dialog needs some love and is not aligned or spaced our
> > nicely in some cases.
>
> You mean the accounts dialog? We've done some tweaks in it this cycle.
> Let us know if you observe any specific issue.

Yea, my eye is overly sensitive about alignments.

> > - Contacts menu item in a group chat window has no menu items?! It
> > should be removed/hidden in that case.

Yea, it should.

> It's now unsensitive.

Great.

> > - Tabs menu in group chats should be removed entirely. You can do all
> > these things with keyboard shortcuts and even with those I don't ever do
> > it. IMO it's just UI clutter (IIRC we removed this in Gossip).
>
> Don't know, Epiphany has one and I think it's good to stay coherent
> here.

OK. But how often do you use it, especially given the keyboard shortcuts 
and drag/drop code there to make that work nicely? I remember working on 
the dnd code for contact list --> chat room, :) nice stuff. Should find 
out if that still works actually.

In either case, another app using such a menu isn't a good reason IMO 
and I always prefer cleaner UIs. But it's your barbeque. ;)

> > - The rooms menu list (favourites) would be much nicer if they were
> > grouped according to protocol. Listing IRC/Jabber groups together would
> > look much nicer.
>
> Not sure; alphabetic order could make more sense for most users to who
> the protocol is just an implementation detail.

Not really what I meant. This is currently what I have (renamed a few):

  Sliff
  #tracker
  development
  lounge
  #bar
  #foo-Meeting
  #gnome-hackers
  #eproj

As a matter of correct sorting/ordering, you would already put the IRC 
channels together of course. But you could also take that one step 
further and order according to account too. That doesn't really help my 
situation anyway, since I only have 2 accounts I use chatrooms with 
anyway. For disambiguity, you could also show the protocol icon next to 
the menu item.

> > - Why can I expand the "Rooms List" in the join group chat for FaceBook
> > accounts if there are no rooms? This should be insensitive really.
>
> Facebook is a strange beast.
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26823 is about detecting
> Facebook connection in Gabble and disable unsupported features.
>
> > - File Transfers dialog has no "Close" button, like every other dialog.
>
> I can't believe I never noticed that before. I opened
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646084

Np ;)

> > - The information dialog looks really unaligned regarding the widgets
> > packed in there. I know this dialog is quite hard to get right, we
> > constantly refactored this in Gossip due to the dynamic nature of the
> > data that can be shown there. There is also a frame round the details at
> > the top for some reason which I don't think the HIG suggests.
>
> Yeah this dialog is a real pain. :(
>
> > - Why do we show the contact's presence information in the "Edit Contact
> > Information", it doesn't seem useful to put that there. The protocol
> > icon is though, nice touch ;)
>
> Good point. I opened https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646085

Great.

> > - The "Edit Contact Information" used to have a "Fetch" so you could get
> > the default from the v-card (in cases where you have a local
> > alternative). I actually missed that recently when I wanted it. Perhaps
> > I am being a bit eccentric though :)
>
> We have some plan to make the distinction between the alias (defined by
> the contact) and the pet name (defined by the user), but that can be
> tricky from an UI pov.

Yea, it's not easy to do either, especially with meta contacts.

> > - In group chats, I see other people's avatars, but not my own for my
> > messages?
>
> That's a Gabble bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32017

Ah great, known then.

> > Features I would like to see (and wanted in Gossip actually):
> >
> > - Highlighting when words are mentioned (like xchat does), not just my
> > nick in a room.
>
> I guess this could be implemented as a plugin at some point?
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547208 is about adding
> plugins support.

Yea.

> > - Time the person has been away would be really nice.
>
> Most (all?) protocols don't give us this information, so the only way to
> do it is to record it ourself. But yeah, I guess that can be useful:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646089

Yea, it would have to be locally done unless provided.

> > Don't take this as a personal thing (given the history with Gossip), I
> > know how hard it is to integrate n protocols into 1 workable UI. Just
> > thought I would share the things which, to me, could be improved upon
> > from my daily experience.
>
> Sure, don't worry, such mail is very interesting for us to have a better
> idea of what's bothering people and know about new issues.

Thanks for opening all those bugs and being so receptive about it all.

--
Regards,
Martyn