Contacts Plasmoid Mockup revisited
Asking for feedback for the first contacts plasmoid mockup was a good idea: Going through all comments (thanks!) and talking to George Goldberg brought up some nice ideas to shape it up further. George works on decibel integration in his SoC project, which will result in a great foundation for a contacts plasmoid independent of a certain application and its representation of contacts.
This means that I'll try to design it in a more generic fashion, which also addresses the concerns of many commenters. Other suggestions I tried to address in the new mockup:
- Contact selection with a hover list might be slow and clutter the interface. Let's move it to the configuration dialog.
- The line edit should look better and might not be used at all. With integration of other applications (e.g. mail) this doesn't make too much sense anymore. I still like it for IM, maybe it can be moved into a popup as suggested.
- Searching for contacts could be integrated into krunner. George Goldberg will work on that in his SoC project.
- There should be a configuration interface. Things I plan to have in there is the selection of static contacts (favourite contacts always displayed) and dynamic ones (e.g. contacts recently talked to / mailed).
The revisited desktop version looks like this now (powered by gimp again):
The line edit to start a chat is gone atm, although I kind of like the idea of /chat Bob Hi actions.
Disclaimer: This is only a mockup.
July 13th, 2008 - 17:13
Nice mock! A definite improvement over the previous one. And a very nice usecase for extenders, I’m really looking forward to this applet.
July 13th, 2008 - 17:33
Ah.. that looks sooo much better than the previous one! Good work so far!
July 13th, 2008 - 17:46
the allarm icon between the name and the text “chat”, means that there are messages or nudges from that user? (or new mail from that user, as the last contact). clicking on them what would happen? open the relative chat/email? and if there are more than one email?
btw, good mockup
July 13th, 2008 - 18:55
This is great!! I was thinking of the same idea once I start getting into KDE development, in fact it was a dream of mine.
Some of my dream ideas:
1) plasmoid should not be dependant on kopete .. but on the addressbook and (eventually) the future akonadi framework
.. you see .. so that the desktop will be the center and all other apps are ‘features’ ..
2) you can implement tabs which reads ‘friends’ .. ‘recently contacted’, ‘now online’, and allow some customization of these tabs by the user .. also another tab for ‘search contacts’
3) Make it modular: a future plugin-system which allows us to incorporate future communication systems .. which may include twitter, facebook or other social networks or whatever ..
4) we may in the future make use of nepomuk integration to divide contacts into groups like relatives, friends, colleagues etc.
5) etc. etc.
Of course these ideas seem to be in the distant future but believe me this can ultimately be the ultimate “social desktop” solution.
Regards
July 13th, 2008 - 19:15
This one is definitely better. Maybe instead of the line edit just use krunner? It would be nice to use it for instant messaging
July 13th, 2008 - 20:07
Wow! Anyone who still believes the myth that KDE developers don’t listen to their users must be smoking something – you’ve taken on board all the comments and used them to produce a great mockup. I’m looking forward to the actual plasmoid very much!
July 13th, 2008 - 20:45
How about just putting a line edit below? Accessible via hotkey of course! Dashboard pops up, Focus on the line edit.
There you can first enter the buddys name (while typing you get a list of matching buddys), press return, it tells you whether the buddy exists or not and if, it either highlights the buddy in the list above, or if that guy ain’t in there, it displays your contacts name in a box below so that you always see who you’re writing to. Type in the text, hit return, et voila!
Problem with my idea is that you don’t define /how/ you contact that person – ICQ, MSN, E-Mail? I don’t think E-Mail should be available in that list. You should be able to choose between ICQ/MSN etc. when you type in the persons name.
July 13th, 2008 - 20:51
I’m sorry, but I liked the first one better. This one is too bloated, IMHO.
July 13th, 2008 - 21:28
Something that you could do with a line edit is search.
Commands are always tricky, because they are hidden functionality in a GUI unless you have a working knowledge of the command set, but search would be really nice.
But if you have sufficient performance, you can do a live search to prune the contact list.
So, if as a user, I type ‘c’, it picks out anyone with a C anywhere in the name. Making it ‘cy’ reduces it further, and maybe I have the person I wanted (Nancy), or a few people (Nancy, Paul Macy, Cyril, …), and I can just click to select.
My Motorola Q9 phone does exactly this, and I can’t express how wonderful it is, from a user perspective..!
July 13th, 2008 - 22:07
looks great!
July 14th, 2008 - 05:17
@Luke: Why not just have a Contacts plugin for KRunner (like George is working on) with a “Start Chat” action? There could also be “Send Email” actions, “Start Voip Chat”, etc.
@Dennis: Dude, a Decibal contacts plasmoid would be really sweet. (Random aside, I don’t believe “extenders” are available yet – I think they’re another SoC project.) Looks like you’re doing an awesome job coming up with the idea!
July 14th, 2008 - 17:01
what about changing the color of the presence applet to have an easy and visual way to see who is on. I can just look and quickly see by the chage in color who is on and who is off
July 14th, 2008 - 19:35
Plasma rocks. Extenders rock. When they appear I’m going to have to find some sort of useful widget that uses them because they are too snazzy to not be on my desktop.