unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jean Levasseur <levasseur.jean@xxxxxxxxx>]

2011/1/18 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
>

Yes, but it does work for gmails account only.  What if I'm using an e-mail
provided by my ISP?


> * 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.
>

I'm yet to understand how exactly this data is used by my system...


> 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.
>

That's exactly what I'm looking for!


> 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)
>

That's all nice but another topic: we are not talking about account set-up
here, but about information fetching in the backgroud.


>
> 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.
>

All of that is pretty nice, but I'm looking for someting a lot simplier for
now.  We have a way to fetch software updates seamlessly, I'm looking for
the same kind of system to fetch e-mails/feeds seamlessly.  No need for a
complicated "identity set-up wizard" for now to get it working.  The only
difference from now is that, my mail client will fetch imap/pop mail in the
background whenever there is an internet connection and then pop a
notification bubble upon reception.  There's already that empathy service
that can run in background, without the client running, if I understood it
well.

Let's keep it simple and build on what we already have!  I don't know the
technical details about evolution-data-server, but when I encountered that
entry in my session set-up, I firstly though that was exactly what I was
looking for.  Perhaps I was wrong, but can it play a role into that?