On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 12:07 -0700, Ted Gould wrote: > I think that this is an interesting topic, and one that we do need to > solve for the desktop. > > I think that one thing that needs to be in your list, 1a perhaps, is > looking at the way that people think about their status. For instance, > when I'm at work I really don't want my buddies sending me pictures from > the party over the weekend. But, e-mail from my boss probably had less > importance while I was at those parties. > > I know that in the spec you mentioned gathering such information from > the WiFi hotspot being used, which is interesting. I'm curious if that > is enough. Also, how much configurability would someone want? Status > on every IM network for every hotspot seems like a crazy matrix. > > --Ted > Hi thanks for the input. I realise that such a proposal is quite open ended, thus I tried to split it into relatively clear steps to go through to try and prevent both blue sky designing and worrying about issues that end up not appearing in the implementation.
I think stage 1, the discussion, should be a quite technical discussion, ie. throw some ideas into the aether and decide which of those is possible. My own train of thought was about having Telepathy running as a central, standard system to use for presence. Presence would cover general key:value type data, ie. Location:Home, Status:Busy, Activity:On The Phone, etc. (those are just examples). There may need to be an agreed upon standard for the naming here, if multiple programs and desktop environments are going to use it. The model for broadcast of these would be, I would think, XMPP's Publish/Subscribe system (I've heard good things about it, but haven't used it personally). For other networks it could perhaps fall back to a generic status message containing the pairs. What I think is the most interesting aspect is using presence locally, ie. having a way to tell your computer what you're up to and configuring it to take some actions based on that. Local presence can be taken straight from Telepathy itself or a local account inside Telepathy, thus legacy network issues aren't too important for this. In terms of UI I think everything should be opt-in, so the Wifi example I gave would have a user explicitly saying "this Wifi network means Home" and "this Wifi network means School" and then the machine only acts when those two are detected. A lot of the possibilities this could enable may be annoying to have on by default, so I think options should be opt-in to begin with. These UI issues are the 3rd stage I proposed though, and I imagine will mainly consist of a few widgets added to some already existing preference dialogues. Thanks, Chris -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
