msn-pecan now has direct connection support (fast file transfers)

[Richard Laager]

Felipe and I have been talking about UI issues related to MSN.

On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 18:56 -0600, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> Conceptually it's not the same, and UI behavior is not the same. Here
> is an example use-case:
> 
> I want a new "personal message" like "party friday at my place", in
> XMPP it would be my status message when I'm available (that seems to
> be the sensible choice), the same for MSN.

So far, I agree.

...snipped...

> I don't want to create a new Status just for that message, and I don't
> want to re-select my current status, I just want to change my personal
> message.

If you already have an existing you want to change, you would just
change it. Easy.

If you don't have a message, you would have to re-select Available to
get the status line to appear again, but that's no harder than needing
to pick some other option to change your personal message.

This part works fine now and this isn't a reason to change.

> When I switch to my custom status (be right back) the best thing to do
> on XMPP is to change the status message to the message of that custom
> status, but on MSN it doesn't make sense, I want to keep my personal
> message "party friday at my place".

You're mixing two use cases here. "Be Right Back" is an MSN status. If
you were just using MSN and wanted to go to "Be Right Back", then the
question is whether or not Pidgin should re-use your available message.

I noticed that Pidgin doesn't re-use the message when changing statuses.
I'm betting it was discussed previously, but I wonder why this is the
case. If Pidgin kept the message, this would work as desired.

Now, if you're using MSN and XMPP (which doesn't have Be Right Back),
then you're going to need to create a custom "Be Right Back" status.
This by itself is an interesting problem. I can see a convincing
argument being made for "Be Right Back" showing up as a global status
(which would fall back to Away for XMPP). If this was done, then this
case collapses into the previous example. However, doing so would mean
adding like 7 global status entries (on top of the existing 5) for
people that use both MSN and XMPP and that's too much.

If we were to keep existing messages, then the only problem would be
with custom statuses. We would either need an option to keep the status
message, or we could just keep it if the custom status provides a blank
message.

In the end, adding a new "Personal Message" field which behaves as
you've described is exactly the same as changing the behavior of the
status messages, except that adding a new field complicates the UI for
no good reason.

I propose the following action:

We change Pidgin to keep the status message when changing statuses and
immediately highlight it in the text entry box. This makes it a snap to
change the message if you're going to (or hit backspace/delete to drop
it) and covers the MSN use cases.

The only problem with this change is that it makes it more difficult to
go from a custom "Out to Lunch" status with a message ("I'm gone to
lunch.") to a custom Available status without a message. You would have
to open the buddy list to delete the message and couldn't just change
from the tray icon. If that's unacceptable, then we should add an option
to the custom status window to determine whether to keep the existing
message. This could be something you'd have to uncheck to make the
message text box editable, or it could be something that would
automatically uncheck if you typed a message. The latter is slightly
more convenient, but the former is more consistent with other UIs.

Richard
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/attachments/20080102/013ebc07/attachment.sig>