[Gossip-dev] Nokia released Mission Control

[Mikael Hallendal]

Xavier Claessens skrev:

Hi,

First of all, I found your mail a kick in the face to those that have
spent years on trying to create a nice UI.

A nice UI is in my opinion what was lacking (and still to large extent
is) in other Jabber clients, so in that sense Gossip is not
"yet-another-jabber client with nothing really special".

>> I'm no big fan of telepathy. It's nice, yes.
>> But it also bounds us. We cannot do and experiment with things that
>> telepathy does not handle (yet). It also depends us hardly on something
>> we don't fully control.
> 
> We depend on Gtk, should be recode it to be sure to fully control it? 

This is just silly and I hope you were trying to be funny.

>> Gossip is a nice Jabber (XMPP in future maybe) client. One of the
>> nicest. Dropping backend support in favor of telepathy would make it
>> just another telepathy frontend.
> 
> No, gossip is yet-another-jabber-client with nothing really special,
> moving to telepathy opens the door to a new world of desktop integration
> and would make gossip really interesting.

Gossip is already really interesting to a lot of people. But yes, I do
think that having support for other IM protocols will make it more
interesting for more people. However, keep in mind that users don't care
much whether it's done the gaim way or the Telepathy way.

> For me it's simple, move to telepathy or die. Traditional clients like
> gaim which re-implement all protocols has no future, it can't be easily
> integrated with other desktop applications and has too many code
> duplication with other traditional IM clients.

I'm quite sure Gaim won't roll over and die (and I sure hope they
won't). Gaim has a huge user base and as long as Gossip/Telepathy or
whatever other solution you choose doesn't provide something better
there is little that will make people switch.

As for the tasks at hand. From what I understand the idea about
Telepathy is that "IM" will be split between several clients all sharing
the connection through Telepathy. That is, one application for a contact
list, another for a chat dialog (that could be started from any
application on the desktop), one for voip and so on.

Keeping that in mind I'm not sure the best way to go forward is to
completely rework Gossip to become those different parts. Or that we
should first try to jam it all into Gossip just to later split it up.

Maybe you should attack the problem from the other way. Take parts from
Gossip and create separate small apps?

In the future, keep in mind that there are those in the Gossip community
that are only interested in the Jabber protocol and couldn't care less
about MSN, ICQ etc. For them it's not Telepathy or die, in fact, it's
likely that Telepathy is only a drawback as it makes the UI more complex.

My interest in Telepathy has nothing to do with multi protocol support
but the possibility to make XMPP more integrated in the desktop. Whether
this is done through Telepathy or a desktop XMPP-server matters little
to me (from a user point of view).

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

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