On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 03:53, Apoorva Sharma
<appi2012@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
To me, insensitive items are very dangerous. The only use case should be for expressing functionality that has been disabled by a user action, that is, insensitive items should appear to the user without the user making them so. Otherwise, the user is only confused about how the functionality will be enabled, or wonder why space is being wasted by this unnecessary item. Items that have no functionality until the user enables them should simply not be shown until enabled.
yeah, insensitive items have their disadvantages.
In this particular case, the advantage is, that you know where to find them, and you can verify that, even when they are disabled. A central point for broadcasting about "Me", setting the Presence state for "Me" and changing information and account settings for "Me" is a viable concept, that can help the novice user find her way through Ubuntu's DE.
For the MeMenu, I think that there should be a button to turn on chat, and only when turned on should the state changing buttons be shown. With this system, showing "offline" is unnecessary, because that would simply mean turning chat off, and thus the on/off switch would provide the functionality.