New Empathy contact list

Par Guillaume Desmottes le vendredi, juin 15 2012, 14:58 - Nerdzage - Lien permanent

I've been working for a while implementing a new Empathy contact list and I'm happy to announce that this work just reached master! It's based on a brand new design from Allan; I'm pretty happy with the result as it looks pretty similar to the mockups.

This new contact list has been implemented using Alexander's awesome EggListBox. This new GTK+ container has been extracted from Contacts to its own git repository to be easily usable by other applications using git submodule or subtree. If you've ever cursed at GtkTreeView for being such a pain to use you should really give it a try. It's a delight to use: you can pack any GtkWidget in it and so don't have to use GtkTreeModel and GtkCellRenderer any more.

One of the goals of this new design is to unify the way contacts are presented to users across the whole GNOME desktop, which is why it looks pretty similar to Contacts. We also wanted to make it look 'cleaner' so presence statuses are now only displayed if the contact explicitly defined one. Groups have been disabled by default as most users don't really use them (they are not as useful as they used to be as you can quickly find any contact using the integrated live search) but can easily be re-enabled in the preferences dialog.

A very nice feature of this new roster are the 'top contacts' which are always displayed at the top of the contact list. It contains the contacts you tagged as 'favourite' but also the contacts you to talk most often. This is done using Folks's Zeitgeist integration^[1].

I want to thanks all the people involved especially Alexander for his help with EggListBox, Allan for his design, Seif for the Zeitgeist integration, Danielle who reviewed my code, Intel who funded parts of the Folks and Zeitgeist work and of course Collabora who sponsored most of this work.

Notes

[1] It's actually disabled atm as we are waiting for a Folks release which should happen soon

Commentaires

1. Le vendredi, juin 15 2012, 15:41 par Jens

Now if only Empathy supported adding contact information for SIP, the "mobile available" icon would actually be useful...

2. Le vendredi, juin 15 2012, 18:50 par Raymond

Great work!!!
Love it!!!

BTW, just asking. Is the single window mode still being developed? I'm anticipated for that for a long time!

Empathy is always my number one choice since its being actively developed by all great people like you.

3. Le vendredi, juin 15 2012, 20:56 par Leif

I'd love to see Empathy contacts even more tightly integrated with GNOME Shell. E.g. An entry named "Contacts" in the user menu of the shell to quickly view this contacts window you're showing.

4. Le samedi, juin 16 2012, 06:02 par Taryn Fox

Very cool ^.^

I'm one of the OPW interns working on developer docs, and I'd like to create some sample code for the EggListBox. Do you know when it'll be pushed into master, instead of a separate repository, and/or how to get in touch with Alexander to ask him some questions?

5. Le samedi, juin 16 2012, 13:38 par Guillaume

Jens: what do you mean? Adding SIP contacts to your roster? Note that you can add the phone number of contacts using gnome-contacts and call them using your SIP account; see http://blog.desmottes.be/post/2011/...

Raymond: thanks :) You mean merging the roster and chat window? There has some discussions about considering doing it but no real plan atm.

Leif: you can already search for contacts in the Shell overview. If you just want to quickly display the roster, you can pin Empathy as favorite in the app bar.

Taryn: I think the plan is to move it to Gtk+ at some point once we'll be happy with its API but that's probably going to take a while. You can reach Alexander on GimpNet (alex)

6. Le samedi, juin 16 2012, 17:39 par foo

Why are there two contact lists? GNOME only needs one, not two. Surely Empathy could use the main GNOME contact list? Seems silly otherwise.

7. Le lundi, juin 18 2012, 10:09 par Guillaume

foo: gnome-contacts is really an adress book not an IM contact list. Of course some user will be happy to juse use contacts and that's totally fine. But for those who prefer to use a more classical 'IM oriented' approach, Empathy's contact list is there.

8. Le mardi, juin 19 2012, 21:57 par Robert Smol

Hi, this looks very nice, how do I show the list? Currently I hover to activities, right click on chat icon and select new window. This seems to be kinda slow, I would like to pop the contact list much more quicker.

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10. Le mercredi, juin 20 2012, 15:13 par wjt

The top of the scrollbar looks really ugly. It just stops in the middle of nowhere amongst a lighter gray background.

The current contact list has it ending at a horizontal line which stretches across the whole roster, and then the stuff above it is on a different background.

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