Re: empathy integration with the desktop

[Danielle Madeley <danielle madeley collabora co uk>]

On Wed, 2011-03-30 at 14:06 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> Yes, I'm not talking about how telepathy works here. I'm talking about
> designing the user experience of chat integrated with gnome-shell. I
> have little knowledge about how empathy/telepathy really works, and I've
> not really used it much before. So, as a "native" user, my view of the
> current status is that:
> 
> * You can setup accounts easy in the global settings dialog
> * Once online you can change status easily in the menu and you get nice
>   messages in the message tray when someone IMs you.
> 
> However, In order for it to work you need to launch the empathy app
> manually.
> 
> So, what I proposed was to have the shell spawn empathy to make this
> work. But, if we can do that without starting empathy that is even
> better. Still, the initial problem stands, as we're not currently doing
> this. 

I appreciate what you're saying about how the user sees things, but it
seems that developers are also consistently confused about how things
work. The point of my email was to clarify things for developers so they
can create the user experience they desire.

> So, we need to modify the shell somehow to make it possible to use the
> telepathy integration without having to manually start empathy. My
> proposal would be to put an offline item in the user menu.

I support this idea.

-- 
Danielle Madeley
Software Developer, Collabora Ltd.                  Melbourne, Australia

www.collabora.co.uk