R: [Fwd: [Ayatana] Empathy is not in line with the much discussed guidelines]

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

On gio, 2009-06-25 at 01:03 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> 
> Oops - sorry! Vincenzo (Ciancia) would you like to follow up to the
> ubuntu-desktop list?
> 
> Vincenzo Ciaglia wrote: 
> > Hi mark. Here is vincenzo CIAGLIA, not Ciancia. 
> > 
> > Have a nice day,
> > vincenzo
> > 
> > 
> > ____________________________________________________________________
> > Da: Mark Shuttleworth <mark at ubuntu.com>
> > Inviato: martedì 23 giugno 2009 18.14
> > A: ubuntu-desktop at lists.ubuntu.com; Vincenzo Ciaglia
> > <vincenzo at ciaglia.net>
> > Oggetto: [Fwd: [Ayatana] Empathy is not in line with the much
> > discussed guidelines]
> > 
> > 
> > FYI, comments on the Ayatana list about Empathy. Vincenzo, these are
> > good feedback, best put in the hands of the desktop team who are
> > integrating Empathy.
> > 
> > Mark
> 

With the due delay and the due "sorry for that", thank you for
considering the comments I made, and here is a summary: basically, apart
from many crashers and missing features, of which I think the most
important would be OTR, which is widely diffused also for windows and
osx chat programs, there are two important problems in empathy,
regarding usability and consistency with the rest of the desktop:

1) New messages cause empathy th flash the notification area. _This is
forbidden_, I do not know if it's written black-on-white somewhere but
we all know that we shouldn't flash the notification area, should the
world be falling. Update notifier can not do that. Why should empathy do
that? This must be fixed.

2) It does _not open a popup_ on new messages. When the infamous
update-notifier popup was decided, it was argued that pidgin already did
that. I am a pop-up hater and the IM client is the only exception. In
fact, for IM a pop-up may be desired. This is because if I start the IM
client chances are I *want* to be disturbed and if a contact calls me I
*want* to interact immediately. So ehm, I know it should not come from
me but can we have the popup back? I would prefer it to be minimised by
default so that stupid jokes from friends will not pop-up in front of my
boss.

Of course the two current behaviours should be left as an opt-in for
those who love it.

There is also a problem: empathy does not handle IRC authentication
correctly. Pidgin has a plugin for that but why not just making
authentication work? Basically, it should hide from the sight of the
user the positive response from the server instead of annoying the user
with a message.

Thank you for reading

Vincenzo