[Gossip-dev] Using xchat-gnome's UI for gossip chatrooms

[Martyn Russell]

Jerry Haltom wrote:
> Also, down this line, I have a serious point to make. The Gossip Account
> interface as it is, in the telepathy branch sucks.

Of course. Currently all account types that are NOT Jabber are just
using the generic automatically generated interface. The ONLY reason for
this is that we haven't got round to doing an interface for all the
protocols we are _INTERESTED_ in. I say that because I don't think we
should support EVERY protocol - it doesn't make sense and what Mikael
says about Gossip being a Swiss army knife would be TRUE if we did.

> I do not want to have to configure an account for link local support.
> That's silly. The interface should be more than such a simple
> abstraction around arbitrary account type and settings.

Of course it is. No one said it was finished yet. The dialog that pops
up to choose the account type is horrible and so blatantly temporary you
can't really consider this a final interface by any means.

> It should have
> some knowledge about those account types. Something like telepathy-salut
> should simply be on by default, maybe with a single simple checkbox to
> turn it off. And it should appear on the configuration page for Jabber.
> Or close to it. And it should inherit the important settings (jid) from
> your Jabber settings.
> 
> It shouldn't be so disconnected.

I spoke to Richard about all this sort stuff on the weekend, and we both
agreed that the best way forward here is to perhaps have different
applications SPECIFICALLY for doing different types of communicating.
For example, I think it makes sense to have an application for doing
instant messaging like Gossip does but for MSN, Yahoo, etc, and another
application for doing group chat like IRC, Jabber chatrooms, etc. Maybe
even another application JUST for doing account set up and
configuration. This is the sort of idea I am coming around to, and
perhaps considering breaking up Gossip to do this. Having a contact list
is quite redundant if you use IRC for example.

I will think about this further and write up some sort of proposal, but
I think these are the basic ideas I have:

- The contact list should be there to "edit" your contacts (and probably
hidden for the most part).
- The accounts configuration should be very unique to protocol types,
perhaps even a separate application.
- We should have some minimal way to communicate, like Peekaboo perhaps?
i.e. Gossip could be the applet? Something simple in the panel?
- The notification area should ONLY have an icon in there when you have
something to notify the user about. The Gossip icon shouldn't sit there
all the time.
- Perhaps separate applications for doing SMS texting, chatting quickly
with contacts and communicating with groups? Perhaps have the Gossip
project maintain all of these applications as separate entities. For
example, merge the xchat-gnome functionality into an application in its
own right but one of many in the Gossip tree?

This is very much off the wall of course, just something I have been
considering for a while now and something that Richard an I discussed
this weekend gone.

-- 
Regards,
Martyn