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

[Felipe Contreras]

On Jan 2, 2008 3:08 PM, Richard Laager <rlaager at wiktel.com> wrote:
> 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.

Perhaps not, but still, a personal message doesn't have anything to do
with the 'Available' status. UI-wise it's not optimal.

> > 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.

Er, I wasn't mixing things, I specifically said 'custom status'.

To make things clearer just s/be right back/gone fishing/

> 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.

So, if I want to set my personal message to 'party friday' properly
I'd have to add a new status, set the message to that, and specify
that I want to keep it. Save and use it.

Later on, I set my status to 'in a meeting', on my XMPP account I
would still have 'party friday'.

XMPP users expect the status message to be something that describes
the current status. Sleeping, in a meeting, be right back, can't type
now, grabbing food, palying wow, hacking, etc.

MSN users expect the personal message to be whatever the contact wants
to say. I'm sick, happy new year, muse's concert was amazing, happy
b-day chris, couch potato mode.

I don't think mixing the two is a good idea, they are not the same
thing with different name.

If personal messages are too MSN centric then I think 'status
messages' should be detached from statuses and just have a 'message'
that can only be changed by the user, and doesn't change when the
status changes.

-- 
Felipe Contreras