Where are my messages?
One of the improvements that we worked on for the Intrepid release is building a combined applet with the fast user switching, session management and maintaining instant message status. I'm happy with how this turned out. I'm planning on continuing the messaging story in Jaunty.
An interesting aspect of messaging on the desktop is that while you can get messages, and get a notification of their appearance, you still may want to respond to them. Currently every messaging app you run provides this through it's own icon into the notification area. Many people I know have both Pidgin and XChat icons in their notification area routinely. Besides the fact that both of these work significantly differently, they also are very different visually providing the appearance of clutter in the panel.
How do we fix this? I think that a reasonable approach is to consolidate them into what I'm coining as a "messaging indicator." The goal of the messaging indicator is provide a simple and clean way for messaging apps to provide the notification to the user that other people are trying to talk them while not having to put something in the notification area. The notification area is evil. Here's a simple use case done as an SVG mockup:
The diagram is simple, and that's a really good thing. Here we're seeing a IM message coming in. The notification disappears into the messaging icon and the message can be found underneath that icon. Nothing complex, but it allows the user to know that all of their messages are a single tidy place and there is only one graphic required on the panel for all messaging.
What is a message? It's really easy to over reach with the idea of what a message is. One could say: "Apparmor is messaging me that I can't edit that file." While that sentence is correct, it's important to note that users don't agree. So my goal is limit this indicator to messages sent from other humans to the human using the computer. Now I need to go and fight some feature creep.
posted on Thu, 11 Dec 2008 at 20:01 | permanent link | 8 Comments
I have thought about that a great deal too but I don't think that that solution will rectify the need for the icons for empathy, pidgin, xchat etc.
Don't get me wrong, this is part of the solution but another part which must be looked at is managing the contacts themselves.
Having a people applet would be great, drop down applet with a list of currently online contact from telepathy. on the bottom of the list you could have a show more option which would open up soylent, or if soylent is not installed empathy and if empathy is not installed pidgen etc.
Thats my two cents towards the situation, great work on the newish user switcher applet by the way.
By the way, give more options than openid, not everyone uses/likes it.
This looks like a very solid concept at first. I was concerned on where we were going with the last updates on intrepid, it felt kinda repetitive to have pidgin and user switcher with the same status info. Now with this mockups I can see the pidgin icon leaving the tray in favor of communication icons as it's supposed to be. This mail like icon should centrilize not only pidgin and Xchat but maybe email notifications also.
Someone should step up and code a gnome-applet that implements a dbus interface to show message notifications
Have you been reading my bugs, or is this mental convergence?
The answer to your question is quite simple: Your mail is in Evolution and your instant messages in Pidgin. These both are also the places you write them.
As already stated in the session you are mixing synchronous and asynchronous messages. What is wrong with the current status bar indicators? You can configure Evolution and Pidgin to only show a non-blinking icon in the status bar if there are new messages.
Furthermore is this in contrast to the new notification thing? I thought you wanted to avoid spamming the user with notifications?
The icon in the tray is not mainly for conveying status or showing messages - it's for providing access to the contact list (and more) without having to have it in the task bar. Nice idea, but does not look at how people actually use IM apps and why they like minimize to tray so much. Evil it may be, but it's also really really convenient. Especially since this is something the user wants on all desktops, etc.
The thing is, not all messages are created equal and I don't react the same for any of them: a private message on IRC has a completely different priority than, say, a stupid joke received by email.
I don't want my work to be interrupted by unimportant messages and consolidating everything in a single icon will confuse this.
I may have the icon notifying me about something like this: 10 unread messages in various IRC channels, 2 private messages in IRC, 2 instant messages on Jabber, I file transfer in Yahoo Messenger, 10 unread mails from FOSS mailing list and 2 unread mails from my boss. How can I tell from a single flashing icon what I should do first?
@tretle: Yeah, I think contacts is the next step -- but let's finish this one first :)
@mackenzie: You need to disable "ideas uploaded to launchpad" in System->Preferences->Mind Reading ;)
@Sebastian: The real problem is that they're all different and they take a lot of space. This is becomming more and more of an issue on both netbooks, and with vertical screens. People like space on horizontal screens too.
@stoffe: Yeah, we'd like to provide a way to access the contact list also from here. I'm thinking double-click or an item in the menu. Ideas?
@nicu: I think there is definitely an optimization that needs to be done with configuration. For me, getting an e-mail isn't a big deal, but for my Dad it's the highlight of his day. We need to be able to configure the different sources of indicators and notifications. And, I promise, it will not blink :)
I like this idea very much. To have one icon which represent a group of messages. This group you're talking about here is the human/person group. I'd love to see XChat, Pidgin, RSS feeds and mail notifications going into one icon. Maybe even Tomboy could get a space here as well.
But I even have some more ideas :) For the future, I also see 2 other groups, system and security. Security would be SELinux alerts, firewall warnings (if configured), failed logins and so on, purely security related which is good to know about for a sysadmin.
The system would have more generic logs (configurable), system updates, PulseAudio devices, a simple volume control (which can start the mixer), user switcher, bluetooth actions and probably also networking (embedding some parts of NetworkManager perhaps.) (Maybe bluetooth and network could go into it's own network icon, but I'm not sure, I don't like too many icons either.) This system group would therefor be a little bit more advanced than just showing messages.
For me your idea looks a little bit like what's found on the OSX. I don't have much experience with OSX at all, but I've played with it from time to time. But my thoughts for extending it goes a little bit beyond what's found on the OSX, by blending in the good things from "other worlds" as well. The cleanliness of OSX and the advantage of the notification area.
I don't like to just copy any other OS ideas and port it into the Linux desktop. I like when other OS inspires us to create something new. When it is innovative and is a big improvement of whats found elsewhere. I don't say we should reinvent things, neither abandon ideas found elsewhere - just not do a raw copy of the idea.
Anyway, I think you're into a good idea here!