[Adium-devl] SoC 2008 Project Suggestion: Events Bar

[Jordan Schelew]

I think I may have seen this suggested before for SoC and possibly  
turned down due to the intimate knowledge of Adium's contact  
controller required, but I cannot remember for sure, so here it is.

This has been discussed many times before regarding completing  
something like this as a non-SoC project. The gist of it is basically  
the same idea as the Pidgin events bar, wherein it is one central  
location for events like email notification, authorization requests,  
perhaps group chat invites, etc.

While working on this it could help clean up the majority of the 1.4  
Milestone tickets (which is likely the release that the SoC projects  
would be included in anyway). If there is time remaining it could also  
handle the organization of the events pref pane - in terms of addition  
of some events (like some errors) and the removal of mandatory pop up  
dialogs - and instead place them in the default events set so users  
can customize them.

In terms of the events bar in the contact list, we would need to see  
it implemented visually in at least three different ways:

  1. In the regular window between the toolbar and the search bar  
(when it is showing). as a dropdown type system? That's up to  
interpretation for now.
  2. In the borderless window, probably similar to above - just like a  
thinner contact entry in the list - except outside of any groups.
  3. In the contact and group bubbles as a contact/group of it's own  
above all the rest of them

We would certainly need a preference to hide it in all window styles,  
plus someone would need to come up with a list of all possible events  
that should appear there and decide how they should appear. We would  
also need to decide whether or not it should be configurable - ie: add  
an option in the events prefpane to 'show in events bar' and have all  
the events (preiviously decided upon) appear in the prefpane so users  
can remove it if they don't want them showing there. (Though I think  
that this is one thing that does not need to be very configurable  
since people can just hide it if they don't want to use it anyway).

Perhaps this is too big of a project, but I think with two mentors  
working closely with the student this might be feasible.

Jordan