If I were to completely redo the gaim buddylist, this is what I'd do.
The application 'folds' away to the side of the screen, ala google desktop search.
I click "contacts" button, or something similar, which brings up a full screen overlay.
It shows my most frequestly talked to contacts biggest of all.
Offline users are smaller, and grayed.
If I start typing, only buddies who match my text move closer to the center, everyone else fades or vanishes.
I have a list of groups on the right hand side of the screen, tied to my different states: for instance, I talk most to some people between 9-5 in "WORK" mode, but I talk to others in "HOME" mode - selecting a different view should reshuffle the screen.
I should find a flash designer to give this a shot.
2 comments:
How does a person I added two days ago come up compared to people I've been chatting to for years?
What happens if I talk to someone HEAPS on the weekend and never during the week?
Hexagons are sexy
What happens with people who constantly change their nicks and pics? Because their name doesn't appear in the same place it could make them rather hard to find expecially if I don't talk to them much?
What happens if I'm logged onto multiple chat programs with multiple nicks or the same nick?
Do frogs go glump glump glump or do they really go la-de-da-di-da
If I'm at work and leave someones chat window up, how will they come up compared to someone who came and went 4 times. Wouldn't it show the second person as chatting to me more?
Assuming they don't have pics how hard would it be to distinguish between 4 "Janes". Would you have a tool tips tag drop down showing email etc..???
My msn contacts got whiped clean a while ago and I dunno who was on there :(
There's a Summer of Code entry called "Contact Availability Prediction" - Mark Doliner is mentoring Geoffrey Foster for this project. Geoffrey is working on a plugin that attempts to predict when your buddies will be online based on their past usage habits.
Basically; if that thing got implemented, it would be used to suggest ad hoc groups; or could be tied into this UI.
> What happens if I'm logged onto multiple chat programs with multiple nicks or the same nick?
A little known feature of gaim is to group contacts together as one user by simply dragging and dropping them together. With further work on this to make it easier to discover, this would make things less cluttered.
> If I'm at work and leave someones chat window up, how will they come up compared to someone who came and went 4 times. Wouldn't it show the second person as chatting to me more?
Perhaps, but logs could be scanned for text from YOU to THEM as well as THEM to YOU and make sure that if you don't respond, it's not counted (thus the contact remains smaller)
> Assuming they don't have pics how hard would it be to distinguish between 4 "Janes". Would you have a tool tips tag drop down showing email etc..???
gaim already allows you to set aliases for contacts yourself; and it's easy enough to render name + email address.
It's also quite possible to set a 'one-picture for this contact' locally; so rapidly changing avatars don't make you lose the contact.
Post a Comment