unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Social Desktop, nicely wrapped in a consistent and comfortable UI, will
bring the Meercat into many a household! ;)

Humans share their knowledge and skills in the Ubuntu community, why don't
apps also behave like that? Something i can't stop reasoning about..
Yeah, we need to untangle Ubuntu's social desktop apps, give them an
intuitive and accessible structuring, make the social apps talk to each
other.
Some more userland IPC for a change would help enormously, and we have most
of the code for this out there already.

Me Menu, Messaging Menu and Contact List, all accessible by 1 click from
Ubuntu's Gnome Panel, are not working together as one, and they are not
behaving consistently with the other giant baby newcomer Gwibber, nor is
anyone really saving up my facebook/google talk contacts in the cloud
(Ubuntu One).
why not?
a) Me Menu duplicates availability setting from Contact List: confusion.
b) Me Menu configures services that live in the Messaging Menu: confusion.
c) "Click-Hold-Aim-Release" is no improvement to "Click" (show
contacts/Messaging Menu): a step backwards
d) Contact List doesn't deserve its name, it's only an availability status
notifier with IM nicks at the moment.
e) gwibber's behaviour is inferior to all popular Website AJAX interactivity
(clicking "like" or adding comments reloads the whole stream-page and breaks
the user's interaction focus by jumping to the top of the stream...)

We should *at least* match the interactivity comfort of facebook.com and
mail.google.com..
Perhaps some dedicated usage of WebKit with a minimal local LAMP and some
accessible scripts and some CSS featuring RGBA in a WebKit based UI would
make a more powerful interface than the Erlang experiments currently
happening in Gwibber.. who knows anything about that?
* is it smart to implement AJAX-based social website UI behaviour using
Erlang?
* does your facebook.com stream jump to the top when you commit a comment?
* does your jabber webclient on mail.google.com reload the whole page for
every IM?
* does your bike release the clutch when you flip the light switch?
* does your mobile phone reboot its UI for each button pressed?

As long as Gwibber sucks, i will use the respective webpages instead.
I'm not alone in this observation, prove me wrong.
Same goes for Evolution, which is a landmark jack-of-all-trades suite of
Unusability [1].
We might as well go back into using POTS and paper mail, if Evolution is
meant to be the state of the art.
Being free of charge is no USP or catcher nowadays, when OSX costs about $50
and Windows 7 is delivered as factory default on most machines nowadays.
If we removed Gimp from Lucid, i suggest remove Gwibber from Lucid+1 also.
It was nice to see it in action, but i can't take the Ubuntu social desktop
seriously as long as Gwibber's obstructive scrollbars are bigger than the
information in between them. Not yet.

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 18:52, David Hamm <davidthamm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=1jC_EV0X2GuZh15xN9QvmUzquK7EjqVkCbqgXbgEsYOY&hl=en
>
> Maybe this would be better then wave, :p wave is still to young.
>

yeah, nice one. This would then be in the Me / Social Menu, right?

We've been tossing Empathy's "Contact List" all across the DE from A to B to
C with no successful integration of human contacts into our DE until even
today!
i can't even dock the Contact List to anything, even if i wanted to. Who can
help me with enabling docking and snapping for this window?

Now, whatever happened to "Ubuntu", which means "humanity" after all, if i
may inquire?
For Maverick, we are supposed to integrate human beings better, as Jono
suggested in his blogpost here: [2]..
Upstream is doing this quite well by finally introducing "Folks" [3] to
Telepathy (hooray!!), after adopting the promising "People" project was
cancelled IIRC, and meta contact capable "Soylent" didn't quite happen
either...

SOCIAL FROM THE START
There's a blueprint for a global social API for Maverick [4] as
Jan-Christoph hinted a while ago ;)
Perhaps this blueprint will be ready for a review after this discussion
reveals some "low hanging fruit"..
This problem is much older than the meta contacts bug on empathy [5]..

Points in this topic that i think deserve more opinions:

* unified contacts for all social apps (Telepathy: Folks)
* menu or interactive list showing those online (Folks in Empathy)
* show offline contacts, if i pinned them favourites (pin like in Tomboy
menu)
* show offline contacts that match my FAYT search on top of list (perhaps
with a seperator before the actual list)
* show thumbs for real people
* offer single click menu with "send email", "chat", "visit [URL/blog],
"send SMS", "call"
* allow dragging of multiple contacts
* drag contacts onto the desktop to create vcards
* allow docking/snapping and autohiding Contact List to the right desktop
edge
* drop Gwibber from Ubuntu 10.10, as we dropped Gimp from 10.04
* ignore Mark's use case, he might need an extra AI to handle his 2000+
contacts ;)


[1]
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/desktop-application-menu.html.en
[2] http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/04/03/introducing-the-maverick-meerkat/
[3] http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Folks
[4]
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-maverick-social-api
[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/256478