Hi Sid
On 03/04/2013 10:20 AM, Sid Payton wrote:
Hello Renato,
I'm working with Mathias on this project. I thought about integrating
this app into a standard application like telepathy as well and
thought of this as the ultimate goal at first as well.
But here are a few things that need to be considered and resolved:
- Most people people would expect a standalone whats-app app linke
they know from other devices (this will resolve it self after some time)
You would still be able to achieve that using telepathy. For example,
the telephony application is right now only handling Telepathy requests
that are meant for a telepathy-ofono account. We could do the same in a
standalone application for WhatsApp.
The benefit here is that in platforms where we want the communication to
be done in one single app (for example, using Empathy on the desktop),
this would be doable in a very straightforward way.
- people would geht confused which way they used to communicate (chat
or Whats app which I belive a simple mark up wouldn't resolve). The
people on the other side would get annoyed because of receiving
answers on another service, which they would blame Ubuntu on.
As Renato already said, this is in part fixed by have a well designed
app that clearly indicates what communication path is being used, and
for subsequent messages, using the previously used method probably does
the job. The important thing is to make it explicit to the user which
communication service is used to send the messages.
But non the less, I belive that a unified massaging service is the
higher goal. After all wie just want to communicate with our friends
and family the cheapest and fastest way possible and don't want to
care which app I have to use. I also think that the messaging
indicator is doing this job already very well.
So, if we go for a Telepathy-based implementation, it would be very easy
to add support for that in the messaging menu. The telephony application
has a daemon that handles that, it would be just a matter of adding
multiple accounts support to it.
The same for the application, it is just a matter of having proper
designs for handling multiple accounts and a few tweaks in the logic side.
What do you thing? Are my concerns justified or can you think of a
solution?
I see your point about having it as a separate application, but over the
time I have seen that people get used to this. For example, in the past
people used to have one application for each messaging service (MSN,
Icq, Yahoo, AIM, etc), and that didn't stop multi-protocol clients to
become popular (Kopete, Pidgin, Trillian, Meebo, etc). I think it is
just a matter of doing it right.
I am the current developer of the telephony application, maybe we should
talk a bit more about the possibilities on implementing that?
Cheers
Boiko
