IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, day four

Day four. People had bad dreams last night due to the huge amount of cheese ingested. Will need to seek counselling. Travis' knee doesn't hurt too much anymore.

Today we discussed the interaction of the “presence chooser” in the Shell's user menu with IM statuses, especially given that we soon hope to make it possible to answer chats without launching an “empathy” binary. A number of options were discussed, and the best one now lives in a bug. (Note that both reports are incredibly detailed, thanks to Will Thompson's amazing screenwriting skills).

Morten then presented his current plan for integration of contacts within the Shell. More details are available on the wiki, and most of the problems and potential solutions were discussed at a high-rate, given the well-known problem space.

We missed out on some interesting changes to account creation (as well as edition) in Empathy/Telepathy yesterday.

Old skool GNOME

Some of us were discussing olden UIs during this year's GUADEC, including the original Totem UI. Searching through my old files, I found some interesting screenshots.

That includes an early version of Soundbox, the predecessor to Rhythmbox (it was later renamed to Rhythmbox as the name Soundbox was already used by some piece of software).

CDDB-enabled, incredible

Also of interest, abc, the audio-CD burner equivalent of sound-juicer, a bonobo-ised version of Rhythmbox, early versions of Vanity (my Cheese-before-Cheese webcam tool), and instructions on how to flash my netBook (click the link, you'll be surprised).

And a screenshot of Totem circa June 2002 (the first public release was in July 2002).

Totem with the original interface designed by task-pooper man