Re: Empathy account UI freeze break request

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Milo, thanks for the very detailed analysis.  This will
help a lot.

Collabora has offered to have me do these updates on the
clock, and Milo has agreed to let me step in to do the
work.  Looking at Milo's analysis, I'm confident these
updates can be written, reviewed, and finalized within
a few days of full-time work.

We really want the changes finished this week, to give
translators a fighting chance.

Paycheck or no, I wouldn't be offering to do this if I
thought it would negatively impact the help.  The Empathy
help is our Mallard poster child.  The documentation team
is taking this document very seriously, because it lays
the groundwork for our revamped 3.0 help.

Release team, it's in your hands.

--
Shaun

On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 19:08 +0200, Milo Casagrande wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> thanks for raising this with the Doc team.
> 
> 2009/8/24 Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org>:
> > Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> >
> >>   We'd like to break the UI freeze to add a accounts assistent to Empathy for a
> >>   better initial user experience. Screenshots for this assistant are available
> >>   at:
> >>     http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cosimoc/assistant/
> >>
> >>   Also we've done  various tweaks to the accounts dialog to make it somewhat
> >>   friendlier to use. Screenshots available at:
> >>     http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/empathy-accounts-ui/
> 
> I've taken a look at the proposed modifications, I have some questions
> on how things will work with the new UI for the accounts dialog, and
> also with the new assistant. I can only take a look at the screenshots
> since I don't know where these branch are stored. I tested the mc5 one
> in empathy, but looks different from the screenshots posted, and
> there's no assistant in it.
> 
> Looking at screenshots #1 and #4 of the accounts dialog, the Enabled
> check-box disappears from #1 to #4, and one button changed its label:
> which one will be the default one? In case, how can I disable an
> account without removing it if there's no Enabled check-box? Also, the
> trash icon to remove an account needs to be described and explained:
> it looks rather small in the UI. Does it have a tooltip set? I'm
> fearing a little bit about usability (I'm not an expert though).
> 
> Looking at the assistant screenshots: the import account feature, will
> it be available only with the assistant? If I select "No, I want a new
> account", what will it do? Will I be able to automatically register a
> new account and with which protocols/services? I knew that only Jabber
> is supported in Empathy.
> 
> If it is possible, please avoid the use of the "XMPP" word: personally
> I always thought about it as a (big) mistake that will lead users to
> not understand things. If it's not possible, we will need to address
> also that in the documentation, and probably there will be a couple
> more topics to modify.
> 
> Does XMPP take into account also Google Talk? One of the screenshots
> says "What is your Jabber ID?", there will be a specialized one for
> Google Talk too? (with the mc5 branch and libpurple installed I don't
> have one). As Shaun notes, there is a strong branding in GTalk, I
> think normal users don't know that Jabber and GTalk are almost the
> same thing, but I think they might be more used in reading "Google
> Talk" than "Jabber" or "XMPP" if they want to set up their Google
> account, and probably even some Jabber users might be more familiar
> with Jabber rather than XMPP (totally unscientific data gathered from
> Linux users friends of mine that don't know what XMPP is, but use
> Jabber).
> 
> As Xavier pointed out: is the desktop sharing working with MC5?
> 
> Would it be possible, for documentation purpose, to add a help button
> in the assistant? I'm just asking, in case we need it. We need to
> figure out exactly how to insert the new topics before starting to
> write them, and unfortunately this takes time that we are running
> short on and I'm basing my suggestions on the impossibility, right
> now, to test things.
> 
> > Empathy will be the first module to have its documentation written
> > with Mallard, it would be really sad to have it outdated already, the
> > following topics are affected:
> >  Add a new account
> >  Register for a new account
> >  Disable an account
> >  Create an IRC account
> >  Remove an account
> 
> Yes, these are the topics that should be modified. Based on the UI
> modifications proposed, there could be one or two more topics that
> will need to be rethought: the "Import an existing account", the
> "Video and audio conversations" (this one mainly for the terminology
> used if the XMPP word cannot be avoided), and if the sharing desktop
> feature does not work with MC5 we need to remove that topic (maybe we
> can leave it in, we can remove it from the Makefile as long as make
> doesn't complain, so in the future it will be easier to re-add it and
> translations will be already done). The biggest one will probably be
> the "Add a new account" since the procedure will be changed: we need
> to rethink that and to think of the assistant.
> 
> From a writing POV, it's a big change that absolutely needs to be
> addressed in the documentation we'll provide.
> 
> If all these changes were proposed before all the freezes that are now
> in place, and we had the time to extensively test them also for
> documentation purposes, well... I wouldn't be writing this. I'm not
> confident of giving an approval right now: if one of the developers
> would like to take some time to answer my questions and clear my
> doubts, I will rethink my position, otherwise I'll let the decision to
> the release team based on this input.
> 
> One personal note: if all the UI modifications go in, there will be a
> fairly amount of work to be done, and I'll be moving into a new place
> from this weekend relying on a non-really-reliable Internet connection
> for a undefined period of time (hopefully less than one month). That
> means that I wont be able to test the latest code, that I wont be
> always on-line, and that somebody from the doc team needs to volunteer
> to help me out.
> 
> Ciao.
>