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 Dec 12, 2008 | permanent link
