unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi James, thanks for your mockup ;) i like!


On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 15:13, James Putt <putt.james@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> Heh I'll provide a picture and you might decide you disagree with me..
>

i made a mockup with similar thoughts in this thread here:
https://lists.launchpad.net/ayatana/msg02977.html
we're pretty much on the same page, i suppose..

The two things i don't feel are
* the speech bubble metaphor
* the "idle" icon
Im not sure that the speech bubble metaphor is appropriate to represent
Presence, since Presence is not only about IM(which the speech bubble
metaphor stands for), but also about the local notification system and any
other service that would like to adapt its behaviour to my state of
Presence.
About the idle thing i can't say much, apart from that i don't see the
purpose of that icon yet...
Perhaps you can explain its purpose a bit?

I'd quite like MeMenu statuses to stay related specifically to
> presence/availability.
>

Me Menu will be about presence if i read the specs correctly.. yes.
Presence and Availability are being used synonymous in most of the
conversation here, as far as this topic is concerned. As a matter of fact,
"Do Not Disturb" is one of the states "Presence" can have.


> The attached picture is what I was thinking. In the menu itself, I'd
> only have Available, Busy and Hidden as choosable statuses.


yes, i'm with you on this. Available and Busy as radio buttons, hidden
perhaps as a checkbox.
At some point i would like to get rid of "hidden" entirely, it has no
sensible purpose.
There should rather be a way of selecting, who can see you, some kind of
"private mode".


> Away would
> happen automatically after a period of non-activity (a la google talk)
> using the symbol I labelled as idle. Signed out would also be
> choosable in the same list, unless there was another method to
> disconnect (perhaps using the toggles featured in the new network menu
> spec, or the account items).
>

We have a social menu with Me Menu, why should any social stuff now be
handled in Networking?


>
> A system-wide do not disturb would be neat, but I no longer think it
> should be affected through my presence status. Rather, doing something
> such as watching a movie in full screen may set my presence/status to
> busy and hush non-urgent notifications.
>

We had a lot of discussion about this.. DnD is not even drafted, even though
it has been on a Todo list for a few releases now..

You can't reject calls and everything, just because an app went fullscreen.
Imagine you're on a Netbook and you just want to show your friend some short
movie.. while showing your friend the short movie in fullscreen (10" is
really small!), you would miss calls and messages, due to the automatically
activated DnD mode.. not so nice :P

Busy aka DnD is something you want explicitly activated, with a rightfully
bold button somewhere to do that.