On 13.11.2014 12:04, Daniel Vrátil wrote:
Getting list of log events (messages) from all contacts for a given person is
a peace of cake. Each log event has a timestamp, so merging the lists together
is pretty easy too , we just need to make sure that the we preserve
information about the original account. Well, that's the theoretical case,
anyway. Now back to reality, where the situation is much more complicated:
I will chat with Dave about KTp via Jabber in the morning. During lunch he
messages me via Facebook about some completely other problem, because I'm
offline on Jabber. When I get back on Jabber later that day, we finish our
conversation about KTp on Jabber. Now if you would merge these two
conversations into one, it won't make any sense, as they are basically two
different conversations.
On the other hand, we could be chatting via Facebook, because I'm on my way
home. Once I arrive home, I start my computer, open KTp and continue chatting,
but KTp would choose Jabber instead of Facebook. In this case, merging the
logs is desirable.
Of course not all logs with the same person are always on the same
topic, but I don't see why logs from chats with the same person over
different protocols would be more likely to be about different topics
than those over the same protocol, unless some cases like seeing a post
from someone on Facebook and then talking to that person via FB chat
about that post.
From my experience I can say that I usually only realize that a
conversation started over a different protocol when I cannot find it in
the history, which I find annoying.
In my personal double-rainbow world, we'd have a system that would
detect conversations from the content and merge the logs
"intelligently". I of course realize that this is far far from reality
for the time being, though.
(That is merging on Dave's computer. In my case the logs are scattered on
multiple physical devices, which is a completely different can of worms).
Basically, the solution I came up with (but never got to implement it in
LogViewer) is, that when you select a person and a date, the log view would
simply show several tabs: one "All Conversations" tab, and then a one tab for
each account. The "All Conversations" showing the merged logs, while the
account tabs allowing you to read the conversations separately by accounts.
This solves both the problems outlined above. I think it's worth asking the
VDG/UX guys, they might come up with some better ideas how to solve this.
I like that! Of course we can still brainstorm it a bit in the forums.
Actually, in a thread about design for NextMail [1], the idea of a
general "unified communication manager" came up again.
And I've already talked about merging conversations in a blog post [2]
last year which got mostly positive reactions.
Even before having such a "unified communication manager", I'd like to
see the KPeople-powered address book as the main point of entrance for
all conversations with that person (including emails, IRC query logs and
whatnot) instead of an application dedicated only to IM log viewing.
Other idea I had, but couldn't implement because of Adium-based Text-ui was
showing the per-account logs side-by-side as a time line:
Time | Jabber | Facebook |
10:00 | blabla | |
10:01 | blabla! | |
12:30 | | blabla? |
12:31 | | bla. |
.... but that is a slight overkill :-)
This may indeed be overkill. I think a tabbed view with an "All
Conversations" tab as the first one should do fine for most (all?) cases.
Obviously these solutions do not work for the scrollback shown in text-ui, but
unconditional merging is probably desirable there.
Yes, unconditional merging should do fine for scrollback, maybe with a
hint that these messages were sent/received via this account.
Thank you for your insights, I think we can make conversation history
viewing really great with the technology we have.
Cheers,
Thomas
[1] https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=122889
[2]
http://sessellift.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/unified-communication-what-kpeople-and-nepomuk-can-do-for-you-in-the-future/
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