Re: empathy integration with the desktop

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2011-03-30 at 10:07 +1100, Danielle Madeley wrote:
> It's very important here to distinguish between Telepathy as a service
> and Empathy which is providing the views of that service.
> 
> If the shell wants to sign the Telepathy accounts in, it's quite easy to
> do that, it just needs to make the appropriate D-Bus call and it will
> happen. Once the accounts are signed in, appropriate components (i.e.
> the shell's text handler or Empathy) will be launched in response to
> requested/incoming channels.
> 
> So if you want to go online automatically, simply design what that will
> look like in the user interface and make it signal mission control that
> you wish to go online.

Yes, I'm not talking about how telepathy works here. I'm talking about
designing the user experience of chat integrated with gnome-shell. I
have little knowledge about how empathy/telepathy really works, and I've
not really used it much before. So, as a "native" user, my view of the
current status is that:

* You can setup accounts easy in the global settings dialog
* Once online you can change status easily in the menu and you get nice
  messages in the message tray when someone IMs you.

However, In order for it to work you need to launch the empathy app
manually.

So, what I proposed was to have the shell spawn empathy to make this
work. But, if we can do that without starting empathy that is even
better. Still, the initial problem stands, as we're not currently doing
this. 

So, we need to modify the shell somehow to make it possible to use the
telepathy integration without having to manually start empathy. My
proposal would be to put an offline item in the user menu.

> Summary: Telepathy is a communications service, Empathy is a view of
> that service. It's like how you don't have to launch nautilus to carry
> out file operations.

Well, you do, if by "you" you mean the user. Of course, any app may do
file operations, but i'm not talking code design here, but user
experience design.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's an old-fashioned small-town sorceror on a search for his missing sister. 
She's a bloodthirsty bisexual cab driver trying to make a difference in a 
man's world. They fight crime!