Re: empathy integration with the desktop

[Guillaume Desmottes <gdesmott gnome org>]

Le mardi 29 mars 2011 à 10:09 +0200, Alexander Larsson a écrit :
> Our integration of empathy is pretty nice these days, you set up
> accounts in the global settings, you can control presence via the user
> menu, get nice notifications, etc.
> 
> However, to a normal user, just logging in for the first time none of
> these things actually work. You won't get notifications from people even
> if you switch to "Available", and the control center applet will always
> keep showing your accounts as offline, with no obvious way to go online.

The presence chooser could turn the account online very easily (just a
couple of lines to change) but that can be a bit tricky. For example,
user sets his desktops status to away because it doesn't want to be
annoyed with notifications; should we connect his IMs account with
'away' as status?

Basically, mapping desktop status with IM status can be tricky. IIRC
Ubuntu used to automatically connect accounts when changing the presence
using their presence indicator and stopped doing so because loads of
users were wondering why their IM accounts were suddenly online.

But I agree, we should definitely continue improving the integration for
3.2; we just have to think very carefully about how this should work
from a user pov.

>From a tech side, we are in the process of splitting the different
empathy components (for example empathy-chat, the text handler, is now a
separated process). The ultimate goal is to turn the 'empathy' process
as "just" a contact list so we could very easily use another one as the
Shell itself for example.


	G.

-- 
Guillaume Desmottes <gdesmott gnome org>
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