[Adium-devl] Metacontact Plans for Adium 1.1

[Andrew Harvey]

On 29/09/2006, at 7:58 PM, Andreas Monitzer wrote:

> Right now, the contact list is a mixture of metacontacts containing
> AIListContacts and AIListContacts themselves. Our proposal was to get
> rid of that mixture and have a strict hierarchy, where every level of
> the contact list uses a specific class (or a subclass of it).
> AIContactList -> AIListGroup -> AIContact -> AIAddress (where every -
>> is 1-to-n)

The question then arises (and I think this is a good juncture to  
consider it at), how do we deal with addresses (or screenames or  
whatever you want to call them, but for the sake of this email I'll  
call them addresses for simplicity) which are in multiple groups? How  
do we handle an AIContact which contains an AIAddress, say for the  
sake of argument an MSN contact who is both in my Friends group and  
my School group. But that AIContact also has an account on another  
protocol, say one which does not support contacts in multiple groups.  
How do we deal with that?

That is all going to get very confusing, not only in terms of  
architecture, as well as in terms of UI. While the cascading one to  
many relationship is nice and simple, it's not going to have all the  
functionality that we want. We can't very well do away with server- 
side groups altogether, that's just not friendly, but we do need to  
work out a nice way to show this kind of thing.

The best way, as I see it, is that the AIContact has no group on its  
own, but picks up the relevant groups from its contents (the  
AIAddresses). From there we stray in to the world of UI, which is  
going to be interesting in terms of what is going to work best for  
the users (though I have some ideas on that for another time).

I get the feeling that this may have already been apparent, but I  
suppose I'm just thinking aloud and checking my logic with you guys.

Andrew