[Ayatana] Message Indicator message weighting

[alex.launi@xxxxxxxxx]

Yesterday I was discussing message indicator support with the Empathy folks, they had some interesting feeback.

Their most important comment was with respect to message weighting, the current design of the indicator applet makes an incorrect assumption that all messages are of equal weight. An email is less important, at least in terms of time until response, than an instant message. With the current design of the indicator, if I get some emails and chose to disregard them for a little my indicator stays active, now if I walk away from my desk and while I'm away get an instant message when I return I have no visual feedback from the indicator of this. As such I may miss the instant message entirely unless I explicitly check the indicator, which is not something we should make users do.

My suggested fix for this was to assign weights to the different message types in the spec, and based on the most weighty indicator, show a different colored dot. Currently we show green no matter what, for the sake of argument let's assign some colors the indicator types. Let's say emails are yellow, microblog messages (such as from gwibber) are green, and instant messages are red, now consider this scenario

I'm sitting at my desk and one of my friends tweet. Gwibber picks it up and the messaging indicator logs it and gets the green dot. Some more tweets come in, the dot stays green and I continue working. Now I get an email and my dot turns yellow to let me know a message of a higher priority has arrived, i click the indicator to reply, and because I still have microblog messages waiting the dot goes back to green. I continue working, some more emails come in, the dot goes yellow but they're low priority so I ignore them. Now I get an instant message and my dot turns red. I click to reply to the instant message and it goes back to yellow to let me know I still have email waiting.

This would address one of the current short comings in the messaging indicator with respect to missing more important messages due to having some low priority ones waiting. It shouldn't be difficult to implement either. Thought? Comments?


-- 
--Alex Launi

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