[GnomeMeeting-devel-list] Re: Instant Messengers

[Mourad De Clerck <mourad aquazul com>]

> Many people are still seeing GnomeMeeting has an instant messenger and
> do not see it as Voice Over IP application. A good example of that
> misinterpretation is the last article on OSNews where GnomeMeeting is
> compared to iChat. 

Hi, 

while I believe I understand your points, as a user of gnomemeeting, I'd
like it if there was a unified approach to the UI for all my real time
communication needs. If I understand correctly you seem to feel that
certain IM features don't map well to certain IP Telephony features, and
vice versa. My response to that would be to make the merged IM/telephony
UI general enough to support the features of both, not to try to
shoehorn telephony into an IM app, or the other way around. 

For instance, there's a lot of overlap between the address book/ils
server in gnomemeeting and the roster in gaim/gossip/... An address book
encompassing all of those, and offering a shortcut "roster view" to a
number of contacts would be nice. 

(The UI should of course still leave an entry field to initiate a
session with an unlisted person, be it using h323 (using an IP address
for instance), or some kind of IM system.)

A lot of the things you mentioned have more to do with the routing of IP
telephony, and what a bad idea it would be to route or bootstrap phone
calls over existing IM networks (if I understand correctly). But I'd
wager that most users asking for an IM like video conferencing program
are looking for a unified UI.


While I'm at it, a couple of questions on gnomemeeting:

- are you planning to use the gstreamer (or other) framework for
handling of all the audio/video codecs, or is this not practical at all?
- are you going to stick with h323, switch to SIP (or other), or handle
both.
- a plea for a feature: I often need to communicate a lot with a small
number of people. It would be nice if I could just tap a hotkey, and
have a session with a specific person instantly open, tap it again and
it would be closed (maybe keeping the session active until I tap the
htokey again). Because I'd like to do this while working, I'd like the
UI that pops up to be as minimal as possible, video only (like an
overlay), and not steal the focus of the application I was using, so I
can just continue working while talking. 

Event today, I'm a happy user of gnomemeeting. The only problems I
encounter are not gnomemeetings fault like un- or half-supported
webcams, or NAT traversal problems with h323 (I mostly use it over a
VPN, bypassing all the problems at the expense of a little latency I
suppose). 

Thanks a lot for this nice soft.

-- Mourad DC