Gui Team Sandbox

Please always provide a box titled "comments" under each idea for people to write comments/suggestions in. We need to communicate on here too!

People

billiob
bluetit
Karel
Lee

Tools

Other useful wiki pages

Tkhtml In Amsn
Cleaning Up Our Act

Useful web pages

Open Usability
Gnome HIG
Tkhtml

Ideas

Gui Component Designs (including code ideas) - bluetit

Start window

The start window is the first thing the user will see when they run amsn (unless they have "auto-connect" enabled).
As explained in Cleaning Up Our Act, we will need 3 sections on this page:

Sign in

Contains:
one editable combobox - username
code to get profiles to populate combobox with:

   set profiles glob -directory ~/.amsn/profiles/ *
   foreach profile $profiles {
       $combobox insert end $profile
   }

one text box - password
two checkboxes - remember me and remember my password
one button - sign in

Manage Accounts

two buttons - create new account and forget account

Change settings

buttons - language, plugins, skin, settings window

Contact list

The contact list is a tricky thing to get absolutely right. There's a lot of content to be displayed, but you don't want to make the window look crowded. It needs to look clean and simple. The user needs to be able to pick out a single contact instantly. They also need to be able to quickly change their status, nickname, picture or whatever. So, let's look at the components:

The user's section

This shows the information for the user currently using Amsn (yeah I know I missed the status of the screenshot, it'll be in brackets after the nickname like usual!) This should contain:

• The user's display picture (not at full size, 64x64 seems an ok size, this can be debated. Also to be debated is whether this needs to be bigger than, the same size as, or smaller than the display pictures on the other section of the contact list (ie this user's friends))
• The user's nickname, status (hide if "Online"), personal message and "now playing" if available.
• The user's mail notifications.
• Perhaps some other stuff - we have a lot of free space here and I'm conscious that we don't want to waste space unnecessarily - but will more stuff make it to crowded? (debate)

The lists control section

This should contain stuff to let the user manipulate his/her list of friends to search for stuff or make it easier to read. It could also possibly contain some buttons to carry out actions, eg adding a contact.

• Filter/Search textbox
• Sort mode (debate)
• View style (full, normal, compact) (debate)
• Add contact and other buttons? (debate)

The list of contacts

This needs to present the user's contacts in a clear way, the main issue here is the arrangement of personal info. Do we have the PSM next to the nickname and the "now playing" underneath, as in the screenshot? Or do we have it some other way? The way in the screenshot was the nicest way I could find that didn't take up mega-loads of space! (debate). The lines of text need to be reasonably spaced so it doesn't look really crowded and hard to read, like there's just a huge mass of data there that's impossible to sift through.

Chat Window

This is the tough one! I have started a mockup but there's so much that needs to be discussed - for exmaple: what do we do about display pictures when there's more than one user in the chat? The way amsn handles this at the moment sucks, so we need to come up with a better way. The original msn's method seems good, but we need to discuss it. The unfinished mockup can be found here:
http://homepages.phonecoop.coop/jenkins/reference-chatwindow.svg Feel free to edit it and show your changes here!!

Prefs windows

We need to decide on a structure for the preferences window, especially regarding "Advanced options". At the moment, we have one tab full of "advanced" options and it's horrible and cluttered! We should have an "Advanced options" or "More options" button on each section of the prefs window, which will show the advanced options for that section. Someone please suggest a revised set of sections/tabs for the prefs window... unless people think the current set is ok...I personall ythink it could be improved but I'm not sure how right now...

Skin/Plugin Choosers

Skins