ulc-devs team mailing list archive

[Frederik Elwert <frederik.elwert@xxxxxx>]

Hi Thibaut,

thanks for your input.

Am Dienstag, den 29.11.2011, 22:55 +0100 schrieb Thibaut Brandscheid:
> 2011/11/26 Frederik Elwert <frederik.elwert@xxxxxx>
>             1. What categories make sense for our lens? (Categories
>         are the
>                sections the main dash view provides for displaying
>         results,
>                like “most used apps”, “installed apps”, and
>         “downloadable apps”
>                for the application lens.) 
> 1. Online Contacts (what if nobody is online - empty first
> category???)

I think the dash does not show empty categories, and this is probably
what we want.

> 2. Attachments & Links (would display attachments and links the user
> has recently sent or received through mail or IM) 
> 3. All Contacts
> 
> About Attachments & Links:
> Unconventional, but could be a very useful category. This is only
> possible in the Dash. The Dash displays information from a global
> perspective and not from an application centric perspective, so why
> not take the chance and merge useful contact related information and
> present them to the user?

Uh, great idea, I really like it. I am just not sure yet what we need to
achieve this from a technical point of view. Has Zeitgeist this
information available for us? Can we access e-mail attachments which are
not saved to disk? But I think we should look how far we can push this.
> 
>             2. What filters make sense for our lens? (Filters are
>         those items
>                in the unfoldable right-hand column used to limit
>         search results
>                by certain criteria.)
> In addition to Frederik's ideas, I would like to suggest an
> organization/company filter (maybe a city filter, too?).
> I don't know if a company filter is already covered by the group or
> category filter, but, if not, it would be helpful for people working
> for a bigger corporation to be able to see all contacts aligned to
> company XY.

For the company: Yes, why not. We should then get all companies from all
contacts and then create the filter from that list. This would also mean
that we don’t have this filter at all if no contacts use this field
(which might often be the case).

For the city: I currently don’t know if there is really a use-case for
this, so when would I like to see all addresses from people from one
city?

>             3. How to display results in the dash?
> I'm one of the 'Community Proposed Unity Design' authors, the idea of
> displaying contact information directly in the Dash was to show
> contact information as fast as possible. Since it is not possible
> (right now), let's use GNOME contacts - as suggested - but add to the
> Dash output → Icon + Name + Mobile number (if the Dash supports line
> breaks).
> Let's use the vertical renderer.

I can see benefits of the “show information directly in the dash”
approach. I just would ask then:

      * Which information? Telephone is nice, but why mobile? How do we
        choose which number to display?
      * Isn’t the horizontal renderer more suitable when we display
        additional information?

> An other idea I had last week was to display the user-and-I activity
> by a colored bar at the bottom of the user icon (green, orange, gray).
> This feature would allow to get a quick overview on the sea of Dash
> icons (negative: it would reduce the overall image size of the icon).
> green = active, a lot of communication
> orange = medium
> gray = no communication for at last e.g. 6 months
> 
> If we are able to receive user activity data, it would be consistent
> to include it as Dash filter, too. Like the file size feature in the
> files & folder lens, it would be possible to display only contacts
> that match a specific activity like: don't show inactive (grey)
> contacts or show only active contacts.

In your proposed categories, you dropped the “recent” category I
proposed. If I understand correctly, this filter would replace this. I
am not sure if I’d really prefer the filtering approach over the
category. The category approach has the advantage of displaying useful
data I might want to interact with without me even having to search.

The filtering can be useful, but involves more actions, like expanding
the filter sidebar and choosing the filter.

So I think it has benefits to have a “recent” category displaying all
contacts in chronological order (from most recent contact to least
recent contact), having the last six or so visible immediately.
Alternatively, we could think about implementing “regular” contacts
instead of “recent”, which might be closer to your idea.

So this is why I think these categories make sense:

      * Online: I can start chatting immediately.
      * Recent/regular: With these people, I communicate regularly, so
        it is probable I want to access their contact data now.
      * Files: There was this funny slideshow my mom just sent me
        yesterday …

The “All contacts” category is not strictly necessary, I think. It is
just nice to be able to browse all contacts in an alphabetical order.
But except for the ordering, its content would be identical to the
recent/regular category. And one does find all information by searching.

So, I see these questions need to be discussed:

     1. Do we want to have a category logic or a filter logic for
        recent/regular contacts?
     2. If we decide for a category, is having a fourth category
        acceptable?
     3. If not, would we be willing to drop “all contacts”?

>             4. Which actions to perform on the contacts?
> To start with, let us use GNOME contacts.

Yes, I think we all agree on that.
> 
> I edited an old Dash mock-up to better visualize the suggested
> changes:
> Mock-up

That looks nice, in general. How did you do that mockup? Maybe we could
share an svg source for mockups, so we can try out different ideas?

> I don't know if my suggested ideas are technically feasible. Lets
> think of what would be cool, then of what we can get. Ideas like to
> grow, your invited to evolve them further.
> :)

One rule of FLOSS development is to release something usable early, so
others can try it out and jump on board to improve it further [I think I
read that somewhere, citation needed ;-)]. So my suggestions is to break
our ideas into steps.

The first step would be, in my eyes, a version using plain libfolks and
concentrate on the display details (like icons, adding telephone
information to the renderer, etc.). This would mean to use only “online”
and “all” as categories, and use as filters whatever libfolks provides.
No “recent” information, no files, since these probably require
Zeitgeist integration.

Once we have discussed the requirements for this basic version and have
a working implementation, we can extend it with additional features. For
these, we can discuss individual ULCEPs [1] and create blueprints for
them.

[1] Unity-Lens-Contacts Enhancement Proposal ;-)

One such enhancement would be time-information (as category or as
filter) and require investigating Zeitgeist, another one could be
files/attachment integration, and so on.

Regards
Frederik