unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

>
> *Expéditeur:* Jeremy Nickurak < <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> *Date:* 17 janvier 2011 18:38:01 HNE
>
> *Destinataire:* Jean Levasseur < <levasseur.jean@xxxxxxxxx>
> levasseur.jean@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> *Objet:* *Rép : [Ayatana] Evolution indicator*
>
> "evolution-alarm-notify", however, is a service. Maybe we need an
> evolution-mail-notify service to fill the same area? Might be more work to
> implement it that way however. How does evolution-data-server fit into this?
> Is there already most of the code to do this as a "service" that sits in the
> background and lacks the overhead of a full UI?
>
>
there's gmail-notify, it has been around for a while and is supported by the
MeMenu.

* UMA and setting up account details should be seperated entities, imo.

You set up your account details to the system, Ubuntu. About Me is perhaps
going to be abolished, or not, regardless, it is a personal identity form
which will be the central place to enter your account details for social
networking sites, popular chat services and email accounts.

Then, there should be a system agent able to use that data to log in to the
server and fetch information about new incoming messages, perhaps get their
headers, so that would preferrably be an imap client, but it may be
pop-enabled also, either way is possible.

so, seen from the beginners mind, i turn on my computer for the first time
with vanilla Ubuntu Unity installed on it.
The firstrun wizard asks me to enter some information about who i am, so
that it can configure this machine to receive my digital identity.
I enter my First Name and my Last Name, my emailaddress e.g. foo@xxxxxxx . A
throbber appears and gives me the feeling that the wizard is acting on that
personal information i just contributed. Now out of the throbber another
question appears: "would you like to be notified about new emails?", this
with a cropped screencast-like animation that demoes Ubuntu's default email
notification method (Messaging Menu indicators & Notify OSD).

{
Problem:
how does the system know that imap.bar.tld is the correct server and that
foo@xxxxxxx is the correct username?
how will it determine the correct password to send to login to the email
server?
- These problems have been solved and the wheel around them has been
reinvented so many times, that they don't deserve our attention at this
point.
let me yet interject, that a good heuristic (and if that fails: a brief
dialog) should ensure that all necessary information is in place to fetch
email information.
}

now i can say "yes" to email notification in the manner advertised to me by
the cropped screencast-like animation of Messaging Indicators / Notify OSD
in action.

The wizard now asks me about my chat account and offers the 5 most popular
services, plus a button for "other".
e.g. "would you like to see  new chat messages, too?", this with another
cropped screencast-like animation of the Messaging Indicators / Notify OSD
in respective action.
( This wheel was reinvented a zillion times with each chat app that has come
and gone, code is lying around, or is not difficult to conceive due to this
fact )
I like the animation, it shows me a very elegant notification process, just
like in those pretty Ubuntu Natty+1 release notes i saw on the website.
I say Yes and the system indicates activity, as it fetches my contact list
from the entered services in the background already.
In the meantime, something like a business card is evolving, due to the
information i am contributing. My generic avatar-placeholder is filled with
the avatar that is stored on the server of chat account, who'se details i
recently contributed in about the second dialog i was presented with upon
firstrun.

So there's my business card, a metaphor for my identity represented in the
digital world, evolving into a complete personal information set, free for
me to disclose to the world at my convenience.

Now i hope i'm not "online" marked as "available" by default already,
because i surely want to know and decide myself, when i become "visible", so
there is a checkbox named "invisible", which is already checked (doesn't
work for facebook chat). fortunately, at the end of my configuration fun,
there's a final question:

"Do you want to go online?"

I check the aggregated virtual business card on my virtual workspace, see
that the information was received correctly, no typos, those accounts i want
enabled when i go on are ticked, so i say "Yes" again.. ..and the messaging
menu is populated.



Personally, i don't know to what extent it is already important to include
Social Networking services here, such as identi.ca or facebook. Even twitter
might be too much for starters.
That would have to be subject to user testing.
This is a vision some of us have already begun to describe, and i hope this
little Userland story helps people who didn't know about it see it, too.