[Adium-devl] Incoming GSoC2008 Application: Soliciting Feedback

[Andreas Monitzer]

On Mar 19, 2008, at 21:48, George Armah wrote:
>
> I am I am especially looking for feedback on defining the scope of  
> the  project i.e. is working on the
> Group Chat UI  for the Message Window enough for a GSoC project?

Hi,

I'm sorry for not replying earlier, but your posting got caught in  
gmail's spam filter (that's why I told you that didn't remember it --  
I actually never received it).

Your proposal and blog entry sound very promising, but I'd like to see  
a more clear plan of what you're up to do. For example, you could list  
the tickets you want to fix. If you want to do more when there's still  
time that's great, but that's not part of the proposal.

Right now, the main problems with the group chat are the UI bugs, so I  
guess you would find enough to do for a SoC. Specifically:

1) The user list in a groupchat doesn't show the status of the  
participants. Right now they all list as unknown status.
2) The user list in a groupchat doesn't display who's op (or something  
equivalent for the service -- XMPP has more access levels!)
3) Many message styles fit perfectly for one-on-one chat, but don't  
work at all for groupchats (for example, when the person writing the  
line isn't displayed). One solution to this that was talked about was  
to allow defining a separate message style for groupchats.
4) The UI is kinda broken right now, has redraw issues, etc. This is  
something that has to be debugged/fixed.

I'm pretty sure that there are a lot more, those are just the ones I  
noticed when I used the group chat interface for XMPP for about a  
minute.

In addition to that, there's a structural bug described in http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/1874 
  that needs fixing, before Adium can be considered suitable for group  
chats at all. However, that's probably something better left for the  
Adium devs to fix, since it goes very deep into the structure and  
requires some major changes.

andy