[Telepathy] Introducing Sharat

[Danielle Madeley]

Hi Sharat,

Getting involved is pretty easy. As Chandni says, we track bugs on
bugzilla.gnome.org - the easiest place to start is with bugs marked
gnome-love or trivial.

If you need help, join us on IRC, #empathy on irc.gnome.org is where the
Empathy developers hang out. We cover most timezones, so someone is
usually awake and available. Connect and hang around and eventually
someone will be able to answer your questions.

It's certainly possible to learn GTK+ as you go, but there's also the
GTK+ tutorial on library.gnome.org, which is how I learned GTK+ many
years ago.

> I use empathy (on ubuntu 11.04) and I always felt that the indication
> (the image in the tab bar) when the other person is typing is not
> easily noticeable. So I decided to try and change it to something like
> displaying 'user is typing...' as in other chat applications. I
> downloaded the source code and was overwhelmed going through it. I
> found the function updating the chat window tab but I couldn't
> understand as I am entirely new to GTK. 

As for this specific issue, take a look at empathy-chat,
empathy-chat-view and empathy-theme-adium as places to start.

Empathy is a massive code base, quite complex and typically also
requires understanding of Telepathy. Don't be upset if it takes you a
while to get your head around it, I still don't know all of it. If you
find Empathy is a bit large to cut your teeth on, there are lots of
other, smaller projects in GNOME who are desperate for contributors (the
gnome-utils come to mind).

Hope all of this helps,

--danni

-- 
Danielle Madeley
Software Developer, Collabora Ltd.                  Melbourne, Australia

www.collabora.co.uk