[Telepathy] Who's really online?

[Robert McQueen]

Ted Gould wrote:
> Hello,

Hi Ted,

> As you may or may not know I've been working on integrating IM status
> into an applet.  One of the things that we decided is that we wanted the
> status icon to disappear when the user isn't running an IM client to
> save on screen real estate.  This is causing some trickyness in the
> telepathy world.

Oh, I didn't know about this. Sounds interesting, do you have a URL with
more info?

> Basically I'm talking to Mission Control, but if the user puts their IM
> client into the state of "Offline" then Mission Control exits.  Which
> makes sense.  But, then I end up going to the state of "no IM client."
> Which is really incorrect as Empathy could be up and running even though
> Mission Control is offline.

Right. The difference would be whether or not the user has any accounts
configured in mission control, or maybe more specifically, whether the
user has any enabled accounts, depending on the beahviour you want (if
you've got a hook to an accounts UI for enabling/disabling accounts,
showing the icon even if there are only disabled accounts might be
reasonable).

> Does anyone have ideas on how to distinguish between the states of
> "Offline no client" and "Offline with client"?

You can use the McAccountManager API in MC 4.x to subscribe to signals
saying when accounts are created/deleted and enabled/disabled, and
therefore track whether there are any accounts around and the presence
icon should be shown. This is the strategy the N800/N810 UI takes to
show/hide their presence icon. This API is in flux in MC 5.x betas, but
I expect a similar object will be provided before too long so porting
shouldn't be too hard.

> 		--Ted

Regards,
Rob