GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 121080
No indication of connection progress
Last modified: 2005-12-22 19:50:24 UTC
As of version 0.5, Gossip has no indication for connection in progress. Moreover, there is no indication when a connection fails to establish (for instance, the server refuses connections). It's even possible to set the status switch to "Online" when the actual connection has failed.
With the CVS version, you get an error dialog when you can't login. We could add some way of notifying that a connection is under way too, I'm not sure how to do it so it's not too annoying (e.g. with a dialog).
"Connection in progress" indication could be as simple as changing the mouse cursor to "half-busy". Thus, the user will be hinted to hold on until the connection is established and online contacts appear in the window.
I think we can use a status row at the bottom of the roster window for showing this. We have talked about having one for signalling who came online and the such. Having "Connecting...", "Connected", or something like that might be a good idea?
> "Connecting...", "Connected", or something like that might be a good idea? Yes, I think it is.
Created attachment 24415 [details] [review] Shows a dialog when authentication fails.
This patch simply puts up a dialog when authentication fails so the user knows what has happened.
Since the bug has been reported, a lot has changed. Did Gossip used to have a status bar to put things like connection state up for the user? We do not have something like that now. I suggest we perhaps have a timer which waits for connection and after 2/3 seconds shows it self so the user can see something is happening. The likelyhood is, in the first 2/3 seconds, they will be connected and never see this dialog. This dialog could also give opportunity to cancel the connect attempt at any point.
The patch is commited but we still don't have a progress dialog for cases when connecting takes a while.
*** Bug 130126 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I am trying to think of the best way to do this. Personally I don't like the the Evolution approach (where a dialog with ALL mail accounts pops up and it gets mail for each of them showing progress). I want something that we can do in the main window? Perhaps using a separate space above/below the contact list to show all connections which are pending? Usually there will only be one, but for future expansion here, and those that already have n+1 accounts, we need to consider showing progress for ALL connections. OR maybe making use of the actual contact list in some way? Any suggestions?
I had an idea that we always show the connection status of the various accounts in the contact list by having them as icons. Ie. light bulb for jabber, flower for ICQ etc and show them as highlighted when online, and darkened when offline. We could have some animation when connecting. Just an idea.
I like that. I saw something similar in the screenshots for the KDE Jabber application Kopete (which is now multi protocol I believe): http://kopete.kde.org/pics/shots/kopete_contact_list_0_10_9.png So by that token, would you also *NOT* show the transports on the roster? Also, there is one problem, if you have 3 Jabber accounts and 2 MSN accounts, how do you show that? An icon for each with the tooltip as the account id?
No transports should not be shown there in my opinion, they are an evil creation that we should not support ;)
Marking this as fixed, since we now have a way to see the status and "connecting" status of accounts. The patch is obsolete now and we don't want 10 dialogs up if the connection is down our end either.