ulc-devs team mailing list archive

[Thibaut Brandscheid <randaltor@xxxxxx>]

> 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?
>
Which information? Addresses are too long, mail address are easy accessible
in the user mail client and names will be displayed anyway - numbers are
the only really useful information left. When searching for a number I
prefer the number with the highest plausibility to reach the person and
that is the mobile number, followed by the private number and the office
number.

Now that I see Frederik's
mock-up<http://ubuntuone.com/1mgT3aOHtWT8IO7BJty25t>with the
horizontal renderer, I prefer it to the vertical one because the
Dash entries look much more like a business card.



> > 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.

No, that was not the idea. On my
mock-up<http://ubuntuone.com/6olUeVcBZFbSOnWhDaO4XS>,
all contacts have a colored bar at the bottom. This bar indicates the
affinity between the user and the displayed contact. This way it is
possible to get a better overview when scanning with the eyes through a
bigger amount of contacts in the Dash. I think everybody has 'dead
contacts' in his address book. When searching all matching contacts, they
are also displayed, and the colored bar at the bottom would make it easier
to decide - in a blink of an eye - which entries are relevant.
That's the idea.


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.
>
This topic is a difficult one.
First of all, I think we can't take away the 'All Contacts' category, every
casual user will ask for that one. They want to be able to browse all their
contacts in an alphabetic order. That might sound strange for a power user
but this is the concession we have to make to accommodate normal users.

Two categories left.
The files category, if technically feasible, would be super handy and
therefore I would like to keep it.

For the last category the question I ask myself is, what weights more,
online accounts or recent/regular. On the one side, there are a lot of
people who don't use IM and microblogging at all (or aren't allowed to use
it e.g. at work) - so that, for them, all the online indicator stuff is
just lost screen space. With that in mind, I still think that online
accounts should be the first category, simply because there is a growing
group of connected people out there, and being connected in all kinds of
ways is just the future :)

In a sentence (my point of view):
'All Contacts' category should stay, the rest is up for negotiation.

So, I see these questions need to be discussed:
> ...
>     2. If we decide for a category, is having a fourth category
>        acceptable?
>
If yes, that could be 'All Contacts' or the file category. The fourth
category wouldn't be visible without scrolling - I guess - when using the
default Dash size and therefore would often go unnoticed, which is nearly
equal to non-existence from a user point of view.


>     3. If not, would we be willing to drop “all contacts”?
>
No. I personally don't need it because I use the Dash to search things by
typing - but there is a big group out there that uses nearly mouse-only, so
that dropping 'All Contacts' would be a catastrophe to them.


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?
>
GIMP →  Here is my xcf file <http://ubuntuone.com/5x1tLdPqdlLQYbZQ4RWlU3>


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
> the


That sounds good.

@ Patrick

> 2011/11/30 Patrick Seemann <patsee14@xxxxxxxxx>
>
sounds interesting. I'm not sure if I know what you mean. What would that
> look like? Would we display let's say a picture that I've sent
> or received in an email (sometime in the past) as a separate item in the
> category "attachments and links"? So that you could search for <some name>
> and directly open attachments and links from the dash?
>
Yes that's the idea - take a look at the
mock-up<http://ubuntuone.com/6olUeVcBZFbSOnWhDaO4XS>.
Every file or link someone sends you by e-mail/IM would be displayed in
this separate category. When searching for a contact in the Dash you would
see the last links & files received from contact XY.

I'm not sure if a vertical renderer would work if we want to display
> additional information, as you said, I also don't know if we can work with
> line breaks. If we can't use the vertical renderer, maybe a filter option
> "show contact details" could be helpful. Clicking this option would make
> the dash switch to using horizontal renderers instead, which would give us
> some more space for additional text. That way we have a clean initial
> layout (vertical) with the possibility to switch to showing more
> information.
>
"...maybe a filter option 'show contact details'" → too many clicks to
display full contact information - to start with, GNOME contacts will do
the job.

Steps needed to reach full contact info - as planned right now:
1. click on Dash icon
2. click on 'Contacts Lens' icon
3. type name of searched contact
4. click/press Enter to open GNOME contacts

If using keyboard shortcuts, the user *can* skip the first two steps -
there are still 2 steps left.
<http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/27584/>If we are able to display name +
phone number the user would be able to get some useful information with
minimal two steps (shortcut to lens + typing the contact name).

I don't know about you all, but I think I don't ever need to look up any
> mobile numbers. Mainly because I have them all stored in my cell phone and
> if I want to call someone, I just use my phones contacts app. So I think
> showing the mobile number below each name wouldn't really give me any extra
> (useful) information.
>
Quick answer, that's the only one that comes to my mind: not everybody owns
and uses a mobile phone that way.


Regards
Thibaut