KDE Telepathy Contact List: Avatars and Custom presence messages

Here's yet another update on the KDE-Telepathy's Contact list component, which I'm working on with Red Hat's blessing. First great news is, that my branch got merged back into the master kde:telepathy-contact-list repo. So all development is now continuing there. It was not really a merge as much as a rewrite. All the fancy Nepomuk stuff was stripped to have something working, but the work on adding it back will start really soon. Besides this great milestone, there has been added some great new features as well.

But before I continue, I'd like to make one thing clear. This is not supposed to be just a Kopete replacement. The vision of KDE-Telepathy project goes far beyond that. I strongly suggest you read recent George Goldberg's great blog posts about KDE-Telepathy's vision to be more clear :)

Anyway, now let's look at the new features in contact list that we've been keeping ourselves busy with. We're trying to look for new cool ways and new approaches for implementing the usual stuff. So far I think that we're doing great :)

First thing is the overall window redesign. We've moved the account controls from bottom to the upper part, added an avatar and your name and possibility to set your own presence message. Let's take a closer look on some of these parts.

Avatars

As Telepathy aims at multiprotocol support, you can have a whole bunch of protocols active, each one with different avatar. So the problem is - which one to display? A possible solution can be to select one avatar and set it for all other accounts and thus unify them all. I can already hear all the voices saying "Hey, I want to be able to set different avatar per account" - trust me, I hear you. I will work on this later and also an overall better avatars handling. But hey, it's a start :) So, right now, when you click the avatar, a menu popup appears with all the avatars and you can choose whichever you want. And you can of course select a different one altogether - from your own file. This will currently set this avatar to all accounts currently in use. 

Custom presence messages

Next great feature is setting a presence message. This is already implemented with per account settings. Currently, when you set a presence message from the contact list directly, it will be set to all accounts. But if you open the account presence menu, you can set a different presence message there, which won't override the main message (doh!), but it will be set only for that particular account. But once you set the presence message from the contact list again, the overridden message will be overwritten. There will be an option to turn this behavior off though and if all will go well, you will be able to select for which accounts to turn this off. Neat, huh? :) Another thing that is planned are saved presets - you can easily choose a pre-set message and presence type.

The rest

Then there are few other things in the works - a contact tooltips (shows info about contact), full contact info dialog, a message-received-icon and hopefully file transfer support too. From the other parts - we have a working almost-working Plasmoid for setting your presences, we have working KCM module for setting accounts, we have working text chat UI (with adium themes support!), currently-not-working approver notifications (the part that lets you know when you receive new message).

So what's missing you say? There are a few unfinished tasks in various parts (for example error handling in contact list (infrastructure is there, it just needs connecting the bits), or reusing already opened tab in text-ui (the tabs currently represent Telepathy channels, once the channel is closed and reopened, it creates new tab)) . And we could surely use some help to finish the left-over tasks! Once the most important tasks are done, we will release a pre-release (and we're really close now). We also have a few Junior Jobs in KDE-Telepathy, which can bring you into speed and KDE development generaly.

So if you are interested even the smallest bit, if you want to be part of this awesomness that's to come, be sure to let us know either on our mailing list - kde-telepathy at kde dot org - or at our freenode channel #kde-telepathy. Everybody is welcomed! (Though we're currently out of fruit baskets..)

Comments

[Fri 13]

Is it possible to hide the own name and customize/hide the "toolbar" buttons?

I want only two buttons to menubar, one to change the picture/status message and other to change status.

Every other is just bloated functionality.

[Keith Rusler]

I don't see how it is bloated and currently it's still in early development.

[Moondowner]

I have one thing on my wishlist for KDE Telepathy: grid view in contact list. And the users can choose which one to use.

If you remember Synapse (synapse.im) had that kind of thing. It's the best thing ever.

[zorael]

Is KDE Telepathy the working name or the real and final one? I'd rather see it be something unique yet (vaguely) telepathy-related, like Voyance, Telesthesia, Insight, Mentalist, etc.

Unless, of course, we will be sharing the Telepathy business logic with other platforms and only supply a UI ourselves? Then telepathy-kde is okay, just like transmission-qt is.

That said, keep up the good work! I've been using Kopete for a few years now but it could use a successor. :3

[Keith Rusler]

@Moondowner We are thinking about that grid view as a possibility. We are thinking of writing it in QML. But we haven't talked much about it.

[Marty]

@Fri13 - We shall see. There is currently a narrower contact list in the works and we may consider also smaller header. But as Keith Rusler pointed out, it's just early development :)

@Moondowner - Yes, we have exactly that in mind. There is one GSoC proposal to add this ;)

@zorael - Not yet, but since we don't have anything better yet, I'm using that for the time being :)

[Moondowner]

@Marty good to know! Whether It'll come out with the first release or not, I'll be using KDE Telepathy :)

@Keith Rusler Yes, I agree that QML will be the best way to be done. Though that depends on the GSoC student working on the task. I wouldn't mind even a grid view in standard Qt for starters :)

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