about IM status icons

[Simon McVittie]

On Mon, 08 Jun 2009 at 21:48:47 +0200, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> On Monday 08 June 2009, Nicolò Chieffo wrote:
> > In my opinion a status is currently missing: d-n-d.
> 
> In KDE's Oxygen, we have user-busy for that. So +1 for getting an icon with 
> this purpose into the spec, it's commonly used by all kinds of messaging apps.

I'd vote for calling this 'busy' as in KDE, which would be consistent with the
classification of presence statuses in Telepathy:
<http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec/org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Connection.Interface.SimplePresence.html#org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Connection.Interface.SimplePresence.Connection_Presence_Type>

If you want to be consistent with Telepathy you could also call any new
invisible state "hidden", and perhaps add "unknown" and/or "error".
("unknown" is the presence status of a contact whose presence we don't know,
most likely because we're not on their contact list.)

We model statuses with a two-level classification. The top level is an enum
(Connection_Presence_Type) which we have no plans to extend, while the
second level is a string giving a more specific version. For instance, within
Connection_Presence_Type_Away we distinguish between "away" and "brb" on
protocols that make that distinction, while within
Connection_Presence_Type_Busy we distinguish between "busy" and "dnd" on
some protocols.

We also support protocol-specific strings at the second level where necessary,
e.g. in MSN we could use "phone" as a more specific type of
Connection_Presence_Type_Busy to represent MSN's "on the phone" status.
As an XDG icon that would probably be "user-busy-phone"?

Empathy has icons (inherited from Gossip) for available, away, extended-away,
busy, offline, and "pending" (unknown presence status, e.g. because we're
asking the user to add us to their contact list and haven't had a response).

    Simon