[Gossip-dev] Nokia released Mission Control

[Xavier Claessens]

On dim, 2007-03-11 at 16:17 +0100, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 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.

Sorry if I offended you. Be sure I really like gossip, for me it has the
best UI ever, it's very well coded and has a good design, really a very
good software! I didn't say it's actually bad, what I want is to push it
to a even higher level, to something totally new that no other IM client
has.

For example gossip is (will be) the first IM client to support VoIP with
jabber/gtalk thanks to telepathy. With that kind of think we are no more
on the state of a simple jabber client, we do more!

> 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".

Totally agree, the UI is very nice! But I'm not talking about UI, I talk
about the backend. Otherwise I wouldn't work to implement telepathy into
gossip but I would start a new program designed from the ground to work
with telepathy. I want to keep the ui and work only on the backend.

> >> 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.

Dependencies are made to be used and to avoid duplicate work. That's
true for gtk (to build UI) and for telepathy (to build IM)!

> >> 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.

I know, but the telepathy way opens the door of many more than just a IM
client, it provides a solution for desktop integration of all IM
concepts. I think users care about that.

> > 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.

True, gossip don't provide something better, but a telepathy/MC aware IM
client with a good desktop integration does provides something totally
new and far better.

> 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?

I'm not sure for the best way here. First of all I really don't want to
fork gossip UI and most of libgossip, if we split gossip into pieces I
want to be sure people won't keep old gossip and continue work on it.
That's why I prefer to keep gossip into one piece atm, or at least one
tarball/project.

> 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.

I know, actually we support MSN/Salut/Jabber/IRC (and more?) using
gossip-tp and the UI keeps clean and almost unchanged. I think
multi-protocol does not force the UI to be 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).

Telepathy provides both advantages: desktop integration and multi
protocol support. For me desktop integration is the best part and can
begin if we adapt gossip to work with the MC.

> Regards,
>   Mikael Hallendal

Thanks for your comments,
   Xavier Claessens.