GSoC Chat Log Viewer

[Mark Doliner]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Mitchell <computers1055 at gmail.com> wrote:
> -Ability to group by protocol, combine meta contacts, or neither

These seem weird to me.  Our buddy list doesn't allow grouping by
protocol.  And I don't think we have a way to toggle meta contacts
off/on in the buddy list.  I kinda feel like the chat log viewer
should behave similarly.  (I DO think it would be nice to combine logs
for a meta contact.)

> -Ability to sort by name, last talked to, most talked to.

I like these.

> -Functions to retrieve a list of all users that have logs
> -Functions to sort and the group the users, depending on user settings
> -Functions to search through the users for real-time pruning
> -Functions to display the sorted,grouped, and trimmed user list on screen
> -Functions to determine the last time the contact was talked to, frequency
> of the conversations,
> -Functions for getting combined contacts, and combining their histories
> together in the right order.

That's a lot of functions.  I sometimes worry about too much low-level
planning before starting the project.  Maybe some of these things
already exist?  Maybe some of them will be trivial using existing
functions and an additional function isn't justified?  It's great to
have an idea of some functions that you might need to write.  I would
be careful not to feel obligated to implement all of these unless
they're actually needed and are the cleanest way to achieve the
desired functionality.

> Is the idea good? And is there anything that I overlooked or could improve
> upon?

To be really successful this project requires a clear vision of what
the UI should look like and the ability to implement that vision using
Gtk.  You might want to consider mocking up an image and seeing what
it looks like.  Maybe you'll realize you've overlooked something?
Maybe it'll look too cluttered and be difficult to use?  A picture is
worth 1,000 words.  It also might be worth playing around with Gtk,
writing a hello world application, making sure you're comfortable
working with it and have confidence you'll be able to complete the
project.

I like this project idea.  Having an amazing chat log viewer certainly
isn't required in a chat client, but I think it's one of our bigger
opportunities for improvement.