[Telepathy] Who's really online?

[Ted Gould]

On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 23:39 +0100, Robert McQueen wrote:
> > 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?

Not a huge amount, but a simulated screenshot is here:

  http://gould.cx/ted/blog/Location_Location_Location

If you're running Ubuntu Hardy or Intrepid you can grab a package out of
my PPA:

  http://launchpad.net/~ted-gould/+archive

The source code is all in a few branches, probably the folks here care
most about the status stuff in this branch:

http://code.launchpad.net/~ted-gould/fast-user-switch-applet/show_status

I plan to write more promotional material (with real screenshots), but
I've been too busy coding. :)

> > 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.

Okay, yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it.  Basically looking
for enabled accounts instead of whether the client exists.  I think we
could do something similar for Pidgin also (though their DBus interface
is painful at best)

	Thanks,
		Ted