

Here's this week updates on telepathy-kde-contactlist, which is being written as part of my diploma thesis for Red Hat. No very big changes since last time as the school got a bit overwhelming, but still something noteworthy.

First of all I replaced the "Connecting..." and "Connected!" inner-popup-messages with a nice busy animation right over the account buttons (also the busy indicator comes from your current icon theme). So whenever you set yourself to be online, the animation pops in and stops right when you're online. Also, if you hover over the button, you'll see the account's current presence type ("Online", "Away" etc) in a tooltip. There could (I'd say should) be some better presence indication which you can see right away, but since the account icons themselvs are very small, there is no room for showing a status icon overlay, though it would be cool. Nevertheless, I'll try to come up with something.

Another cool thing is that now the accounts are dynamically added to contact list when you add a new account elsewhere with Telepathy (for example in the KCM Telepathy module or Empathy config). You add a new account and a new button appears. Simple. Same with removing - the button disappears. Also with that comes an error message inner-popup informing you, that some of your accounts was removed from Telepathy or that it was disabled. That's because when the account is disabled/removed, its button is also removed from the bottom, so that you won't end up wondering, where did the button go.

Next three things will describe one screenshot:



1) The top toolbar is now icons only and though you can set a global KDE config option for the toolbar text and/or icons, I disabled it here. Imagine just those three buttons with the icon text next to them - "Add new contact", "Show/Hide groups", "Show/Hide offline users" - now add at least 24x24 icons and imagine how big would have the width of the window be. Simply way too much (especially when there will be more buttons). And this is not an application, that you'll run in fullscreen, but rather in as smallest size as possible. So this presented two usability issues and I picked the lesser-evil-one.

2) Thanks to David Edmundson, you can now hide offline users (the third icon) and have the contacts sorted alphabetically (it will also be possible to sort them by status later).

3) The pretty group headers are now back with a expand/collapse sign now (the "-" on the left). The expand/collapse button will be done differently in the end, it's just there so you know the state of the group. Speaking of which, the account groups are still not supported. But if anyone would like to write a groupping model for that, you're more than welcome!

That's it for now. You can still grab the code from ﻿kde:clones/telepathy-contact-list/mklapetek/telepathy-contact-list-new (see the wiki) but it will soon be merged back to the main tree. There are a few crashes currently and I also want to implement error handling (connection etc) first and right after that, I'm going to merge this back.

Stay tuned for more updates from the KDE Telepathy land...