about IM status icons

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 09 Jun 2009 at 11:56:26 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> user-online
> user-available  - I can and wish to chat
> [...]
> But seems that at the moment we're likely going to consider online and
> available as the same.

The terminology that Telepathy occasionally uses is that any status in which
you're connected to the server is an online status - so online isn't a status,
it's an adjective that might apply to statuses.

In addition we have two "I don't know" statuses that aren't really either
online or offline, but those make no sense to set on yourself.

+-----------+------------+
| available |}           |
| away      |}           |
| busy      |} online    |
| hidden    |}           |
| ...       |}           |
+-----------+------------+
| unknown   |} might be  |
| error     |}  online?  |
+-----------+------------+
| offline   | not online |
+-----------+------------+

Does this match what you're doing?

> user-invisible   - I don't want to be seen

Is this part of an existing API? If not, any chance we could persuade you to
change it to "hidden" to match what we already call this status?

If your intention is that these are icons usable by a general-purpose IM
client, then I think you need "unknown" too, and perhaps "error" (although
error could borrow the icon from either unknown or offline). In practice it's
necessary to have some way to indicate "I'm asking this person to add me to
their contact list but they haven't got back to me"; in Empathy we use a (?)
icon, which I think was originally from Gossip.

    Simon