Re: [Ayatana] Fwd: Evolution indicator

[Jean Levasseur <levasseur.jean@xxxxxxxxx>]

2011/1/18 frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>

Expéditeur: Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: 17 janvier 2011 18:38:01 HNE

Destinataire: Jean Levasseur <levasseur.jean@xxxxxxxxx>

Objet: Rép : [Ayatana] Evolution indicator

"evolution-alarm-notify", however, is a service. Maybe we need an evolution-mail-notify service to fill the same area? Might be more work to implement it that way however. How does evolution-data-server fit into this? Is there already most of the code to do this as a "service" that sits in the background and lacks the overhead of a full UI?

there's gmail-notify, it has been around for a while and is supported by the MeMenu

Yes, but it does work for gmails account only.  What if I'm using an e-mail provided by my ISP?
 

* UMA and setting up account details should be seperated entities, imo.

You set up your account details to the system, Ubuntu. About Me is perhaps going to be abolished, or not, regardless, it is a personal identity form which will be the central place to enter your account details for social networking sites, popular chat services and email accounts.

I'm yet to understand how exactly this data is used by my system...
 

Then, there should be a system agent able to use that data to log in to the server and fetch information about new incoming messages, perhaps get their headers, so that would preferrably be an imap client, but it may be pop-enabled also, either way is possible.

That's exactly what I'm looking for!
 

so, seen from the beginners mind, i turn on my computer for the first time with vanilla Ubuntu Unity installed on it.

The firstrun wizard asks me to enter some information about who i am, so that it can configure this machine to receive my digital identity.

I enter my First Name and my Last Name, my emailaddress e.g. foo@xxxxxxx . A throbber appears and gives me the feeling that the wizard is acting on that personal information i just contributed. Now out of the throbber another question appears: "would you like to be notified about new emails?", this with a cropped screencast-like animation that demoes Ubuntu's default email notification method (Messaging Menu indicators & Notify OSD)

That's all nice but another topic: we are not talking about account set-up here, but about information fetching in the backgroud.
 

now i can say "yes" to email notification in the manner advertised to me by the cropped screencast-like animation of Messaging Indicators / Notify OSD in action.

The wizard now asks me about my chat account and offers the 5 most popular services, plus a button for "other".

e.g. "would you like to see  new chat messages, too?", this with another cropped screencast-like animation of the Messaging Indicators / Notify OSD in respective action.

( This wheel was reinvented a zillion times with each chat app that has come and gone, code is lying around, or is not difficult to conceive due to this fact )

I like the animation, it shows me a very elegant notification process, just like in those pretty Ubuntu Natty+1 release notes i saw on the website.

I say Yes and the system indicates activity, as it fetches my contact list from the entered services in the background already.

In the meantime, something like a business card is evolving, due to the information i am contributing. My generic avatar-placeholder is filled with the avatar that is stored on the server of chat account, who'se details i recently contributed in about the second dialog i was presented with upon firstrun.

So there's my business card, a metaphor for my identity represented in the digital world, evolving into a complete personal information set, free for me to disclose to the world at my convenience.

Now i hope i'm not "online" marked as "available" by default already, because i surely want to know and decide myself, when i become "visible", so there is a checkbox named "invisible", which is already checked (doesn't work for facebook chat). fortunately, at the end of my configuration fun, there's a final question:

"Do you want to go online?"

I check the aggregated virtual business card on my virtual workspace, see that the information was received correctly, no typos, those accounts i want enabled when i go on are ticked, so i say "Yes" again.. ..and the messaging menu is populated.

Personally, i don't know to what extent it is already important to include Social Networking services here, such as identi.ca or facebook. Even twitter might be too much for starters.

That would have to be subject to user testing.

This is a vision some of us have already begun to describe, and i hope this little Userland story helps people who didn't know about it see it, too.

All of that is pretty nice, but I'm looking for someting a lot simplier 
for now.  We have a way to fetch software updates seamlessly, I'm 
looking for the same kind of system to fetch e-mails/feeds seamlessly.  
No need for a complicated "identity set-up wizard" for now to get it 
working.  The only difference from now is that, my mail client will 
fetch imap/pop mail in the background whenever there is an internet 
connection and then pop a notification bubble upon reception.  There's 
already that empathy service that can run in background, without the 
client running, if I understood it well.

Let's keep it simple and build on what we already have!  I don't know the technical details about evolution-data-server, but when I encountered that entry in my session set-up, I firstly though that was exactly what I was looking for.  Perhaps I was wrong, but can it play a role into that?