GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 664259
No distinction between the Empathy contact list (roster) and chat/call windows
Last modified: 2011-12-08 11:53:07 UTC
Since GNOME 3.2 Empathy roster window doesn't minimize to the systray/notification area. Contacts are now searchable through Activities or GNOME Contact, but I still think there are use cases that need Empathy roster window: 1. Quick looking up for contacts in a certain group. For example I need to ping one of my colleagues. Instead of looking at a group of contacts "Colleagues" in the roster, I need to check every contact if he/she is online or not. 2. Opening MUC, IRC channel etc. The problem is not only that the roster window is not available under an icon in systray. The problem is also that once you close the roster window it's pretty much hidden from the user. You cannot open it any obvious way. The only way I found was right-clicking on Empathy icon in dash and choosing "New Window". It doesn't really imply that it will open the roster window. Suggested solution: 1. Make a contact overview in Activities where you can see what contacts are online. 2. Bring back Empathy icon to systray.
empathy and empathy-chat/av/call/etc should have different app names. It's that easy. Dunno why it's not changed yet...
That's exactly the same behaviour for me. In addition closed chat windows won't popup as notification again when a new message arrives. That might be related to the "lost" roster window somehow? Cheers
The issue is not that there is no "notification icon" (aka systray icon) for the contact list, but rather that clicking the Empathy launcher in gnome shell will focus existing chat windows instead of showing the contact list. Current workarounds: - middle-clicking the empathy launcher - right-clicking the empathy launcher and selecting "New window" - alt+F2 "empathy" As I understand it, the potential fix is to make a separate set of launchers (with different icons?) for those two cases, or that the Shell handles it with some dark magic. Perhaps what the shell could used the "jumplist" feature planned for 3.4 so that when clicking the empathy launcher, it provides you with a choice. Or maybe there's some other way the contact list could be special-cased. I'd love to hear the design team's take on this.
(In reply to comment #3) > The issue is not that there is no "notification icon" (aka systray icon) for > the contact list, but rather that clicking the Empathy launcher in gnome shell > will focus existing chat windows instead of showing the contact list. Agreed. There's already a bug report for that though, so let's close this one. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 658043 ***