On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Alexander Larsson <[email protected]> wrote:
> > * An icon in the system tray area which gives dropdown with online > and recent contact shortcuts, as well as an item to open the > contacts. > * A people tab in the overview > * Return contacts when searching in the overview > > None of these are imho ideal. The search one is very efficient, but > not very discoverable, so it must be combined with something else. The > icon in the system tray is not really matching the purpose of the > system area (to show the state of the system). The people tab while > good for fast lookups, will not be able to give the full set of > features outlined above (being pretty low in UI complexity), and will > make it hard to interact with other apps (via e.g. dnd). So it can't > replace a full address book dialog, and doesn't make it natural to > reach it quickly. > > Here is a start idea of a possible UI that builds on a combination of > the above: > > * The address book is multi-window. The main window lists contacts in > very short form, and allows searching grouping, sorting, filtering, > selection, adding, removing, etc. It also has a few shortcuts on > each contact to quickly start a conversation, but the main operation > on each contact is bringing up a separate window with > the contact information, status and possible operations. It probably > looks something like the two-pane design on > http://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Contacts > * The overview gets a new tab "people" which contains a subset of the > contacts information (online, favorites, recently contacted, etc) > with a small preview of the contact (picture, name, nick, im status, > last tweet, last IM, etc). Clicking on it will bring up the contact > in a window, just like in the address book. > * Search in the overview includes search hits from the full set of > contacts, looking and working similarly to the people tab entries. > * Make it possible to go online on IM from the user menu > * Add a shortcut to the address book on the dash by default. > > The weakest part of this is imho the dash shortcut, as it makes the > contacts dialog seem like an external app rather than a core thing, but > I can't find a better place for it. > > We may also want to allow adding contacts to the dash, just to make the > contacts a first class citizen of the overview, but i'm not sure how > useful this is in practice. Hey Alex, thanks for these thoughts. I agree with most of them, so I'll just point out the few things where I see things differently or would put a different emphasis. One more addition for your 'tasks involving contacts' list: * Schedule a meeting and invite participants I'm not sure we really want a separate people tab in the overview. I know it is tempting, now that we have these 'tabs', to just keep adding on there: places, documents, contacts, what have you... but I think it will lead to a clunky experience if we add a separate tab for each class of objects that we want to treat as important. Showing contacts (and documents, etc) in the search results on the other hand, seems like a very natural idea and makes a ton of sense. Wrt to the contacts app: For better or worse, the gnome3 design is app-centric, so we should not avoid making things 'external apps' - quite the contrary, we need to encourage strong, new apps to make the shell design really work out. So I am all for making the contacts an app; that doesn't prevent it from being a well-integrated part of the experience. Matthias _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
