Account editor

[John Bailey]

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Dale Worley wrote:
>> You can't change the 'account' or 'screenname.' That's essentially
>> deleting the person and creating a new one.
> 
> In the implementation, that might be so.  But if I added Fred and
> misspelled his screenname, and then wanted to correct the screenname, I
> would not think of it as deleting Fred from my buddy list and adding a
> *different* Fred, but as correcting the information that Pidgin uses to
> contact Fred.

I will note that at least MSN can verify that the buddy you try to add is valid.
 If you make a mistake typing this information in, it should in the majority of
cases make the buddy's screen name fail validation and generate an error message
to that effect.  I think Yahoo may do this as well.

>> Both alias and group use
>> direct manipulation, which is widely considered preferable to doing
>> things in some external dialog. Do you have a specific need that's not
>> being met?
> 
> Yes -- when I desire to edit something, I right click on it, select Edit
> or Properties, and expect to be shown a dialog that looks like the one I
> used to create it.  That is, the need is that Pidgin resemble other
> applications that I use.  In a sense, this is a pure waste, but as a
> user interface issue, the goal is to resemble what the users expect.
> 
> Thinking about this a bit more, I expect most of the items on the
> right-click menu of an object to be "the actions I want this object to
> do, or that I want to do with it", but if I want to change the object, I
> expect that to be done with an Edit/Properties/Options item.

Meeting user expectations is usually something a user wants an application's
developers to do.  That doesn't necessarily make it the right thing to do.  I
don't think a menu option for "Edit", "Properties", or "Options" is appropriate
here--instead this should be left to a plugin if so desired.  It should be
fairly trivial to do with a libpurple plugin using the request API so that it
can work with any theoretical libpurple UI, or even Finch if Finch follows the
Pidign model here.

>>> There are also a bunch of little icons (green ball, red X, arrows and
>>> doors) whose meanings are obscure, but if you hover the mouse over them,
>>> Pidgin won't tell you what they mean.  (Though if you hover the mouse
>>> over a buddy's name it will helpfully tell you what their name is, which
>>> you already knew.)
>> On what protocols?
> 
> I haven't found any protocol for which the status icon is explained on
> hovering, or that little "thing with the radio wave" on the right side.

We don't have a tooltip for the status icon itself, no, but the fact that the
icons change when users change status should make it obvious what the icon
itself is for, and the actual statuses are shown in the tooltip for the buddy.
These should make it obvious what the vast majority of our icons mean.

John
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