KTp/Components/Chat Window

This page is about planning and design of Telepathy's Chat Window

About Telepathy's new Chat Window

Maintainers

Maintainers: David Edmundson (d_ed) Close second in command : Dominick Schmidt (domme)

see code for email addresses

Getting involved

Bug/task list here: http://bit.ly/dLdd2W

Please mark something as assigned if you take on a task.

Reporting bugs

This component is open to reporting bugs, and any missing features that a standard normal chat program (like PSI) has. Make sure to select text-chat-ui as the component in bugzilla.

Crazy controversial ideas won't be considered for the first build.

Usage

Start a text chat using the telepathy-test-tool.

Design Decisions

Why not straight porting Kopete's window?

Kopete's Chat window is overly complex and deeply integrated with Kopete's internals, hence it is quite impossible to do a full porting without losing time and mental sanity. However, there are some things we can learn and even pick from Kopete.

Mistakes which we should not repeat

• I'm all for modularity, but having a KPart for each component statically referenced in the core is possibly something we don't want to repeat
• Think about the future: try having an higer level of abstraction and avoid using custom widgets wherever possible

About our new chat window

Components modularity and integration

In my view, we would have a chat window almost identical to KMess' one: a single (tabbed) window, with a contact list, input+actions field and message view for each tab. KXMLGui can really come handy here, but I'd like to avoid using KParts as it really does not make a lot of sense to me, when we can simply use a set of widgets.

Interface

What comes to my mind is that the use case of such a window is similar to rekonq or chrome. Hence, the principle of ditching the menu bar could be appliable here as well (P.S.: the official MSN client already does this, IIRC).