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Bug 655117 - Add a robohash backend
Add a robohash backend
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 655116
Product: gnome-contacts
Classification: Core
Component: general
unspecified
Other All
: Low normal
: ---
Assigned To: GNOME Contacts maintainer(s)
GNOME Contacts maintainer(s)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2011-07-22 12:21 UTC by Nick Richards
Modified: 2012-07-18 22:27 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Nick Richards 2011-07-22 12:21:36 UTC
Having generic photos of people as a fallback is bad. Robohash creates awesome generative robot based avatars based on text input.

http://robohash.org/

Even if this specific implementation is rejected it would be good to have stable generative differentiation between contacts.

This bug may also be related to:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=655116
Comment 1 Travis Reitter 2011-07-22 15:40:04 UTC
This is pretty awesome. +1 on this idea from me.
Comment 3 Raul Gutierrez Segales 2011-09-08 13:35:25 UTC
I believe this will be implemented directly by Alex in Gnome Contacts, so moving to Contacts.
Comment 4 Allan Day 2012-04-22 19:54:52 UTC
This is really needed, and I'd love to see it in GNOME 3.6.

My one hesitation is the use of robots for the images. Are robots appropriate for our users? Do they tie in with the graphics we have elsewhere in GNOME? But then, I'm not sure what would be better...
Comment 5 Allan Day 2012-04-22 20:00:01 UTC
An alternative would be to have a collection of stock images that we allocate randomly, possibly randomly changing their colours too. They wouldn't be unique like the robohashes, of course.
Comment 6 Travis Reitter 2012-04-23 17:50:08 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> This is really needed, and I'd love to see it in GNOME 3.6.
> 
> My one hesitation is the use of robots for the images. Are robots appropriate
> for our users? Do they tie in with the graphics we have elsewhere in GNOME? But
> then, I'm not sure what would be better...

I agree that robots may have a slightly bad connotation or at least reinforce the "Linux is for geeks" stereotype.

On the other hand, if we created our own version that generated avatars that look like (cartoon) people, we'd end up setting avatars that look like someone, but not the person they're attached to. And that might be worse than avatars that (intentionally) bear no relationship to the person.

Colored-and-textured patterns might be a good (but much less fun) option. I think some blogs do that for anonymous commentators.

Yet another option would be to do some stylized picture that includes the first (couple?) letters in their name and varies with colors and textures. But it would require us to carefully sync with changes in name (which might not be worth the effort).
Comment 7 Travis Reitter 2012-04-23 17:55:36 UTC
(In reply to comment #5)
> An alternative would be to have a collection of stock images that we allocate
> randomly, possibly randomly changing their colours too. They wouldn't be unique
> like the robohashes, of course.

It just comes down to how rare you make hashing collisions. I think Robohash only has tens of images for each set and gets most of their variety from different head/nose/eyes/color combinations.
Comment 8 Jakub Steiner 2012-05-09 11:36:03 UTC
If we look up avatars using gravatar, it has a similar fallback functionality built in. See bug 674624
Comment 9 Travis Reitter 2012-05-09 17:22:24 UTC
(In reply to comment #8)
> If we look up avatars using gravatar, it has a similar fallback functionality
> built in. See bug 674624

Sounds good to me. Robohash is a fun idea but might not want to be something we'd turn on by default.
Comment 10 Guillaume Desmottes 2012-06-18 13:42:53 UTC
Closing as a dup of bug #655116 as this should be done in Folks so Empathy could use them as well.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 655116 ***
Comment 11 Allan Day 2012-07-18 17:18:47 UTC
I discussed this with Jon and Jimmac a little while ago, and we agreed that something more in the style of http://vanillicon.com/ would make sense - it's simple, fun, and doesn't carry the semiotic baggage you get with robots :) .
Comment 12 Travis Reitter 2012-07-18 21:25:03 UTC
(In reply to comment #11)
> I discussed this with Jon and Jimmac a little while ago, and we agreed that
> something more in the style of http://vanillicon.com/ would make sense - it's
> simple, fun, and doesn't carry the semiotic baggage you get with robots :) .

Sounds like the best solution to me.
Comment 13 Jakub Steiner 2012-07-18 22:27:12 UTC
We just need tomake sure all our emoticons are happy. While you will not see yours yourself, it would be not nice to hear from someone you're a frowny green circle.