unity-design team mailing list archive

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

yeah, we considered "Recent Conversations" aka "Recent Contact" in some of
the mockups from the Me&Messaging Menu brainstorming threads..
A very good example here might be Skype, which also has "Recent
Conversations".

According to the cosmic "Law of Correspondence", when i see and subsequently
click something labelled "Chat", i would expect to find a most uncomplicated
way of doing that, "chat" being a verb here.
Since in most cases we want to respond to, resume or review a previously
commenced conversation, "Recent Contact" would be useful, with "Contact"
meaning a conversation, a filetransfer, a VoIP call or a personal
subscription.


On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 18:32, Shane Fagan <shanepatrickfagan@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Ok so ive been thinking a lot about chat and empathy/telepathy is
> awesome but Shell is pulling away from unity in terms of how to best
> use it. At the moment we have the default empathy so we have the
> window and messaging menu system.
>
> While Shell has a special chat notifier that you can see the chat
> history and type but still continue with what you are doing and type
> on the fly. I think this is a lot faster, easier and better looking in
> general.
>

yeah, Shell works well with Empathy, up to the point that Empathy becomes a
background engine.
The fact that Empathy's UI is the Chat UI we use in Unity is not so fresh,
and your mail raises important questions.


>
> Im not saying build a new chat and notification system specifically
> for empathy chat but a quick window in the right corner with the last
> few messages or something and a text box would do and it would only
> pop up if the user clicks on the messaging menu item for that chat. I
> think it would be pretty nice to use.
>
> Thoughts?


I think it would make a lot more sense to focus on messaging, especially in
the Instant Messaging way you suggest, in the Messaging Menu, than to fill
that menu with application launchers, for which purpose we already have the
Unity launcher. I think clicking the envelope or whatever other symbolic
icon will represent "Conversation" or "Message" in the future should present
me with just that: conversations.
Every other thing would be semantically misaligned.