GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 657715
[contact search] Be able to do more things with the contact
Last modified: 2014-04-01 08:57:19 UTC
Atm clicking on a contact in Shell's overview opens it in gnome-contacts, which is cool. But it would be even cooler to be able to do more things (start a chat, call, send an email, etc). We considered different approach for this during the hackfest: https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/IMContacts%20Social2011/Tasks/ShellDesignContacts Personally I really like the keyword approach: "chat guillaume<enter>" opening a text chat; same for 'call', 'mail', etc.
*** Bug 662518 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Allan: what do you think about this? I'd really like to implement something like that.
There's a few things to consider here. First, the long term plan for search in the shell is to have different apps providing results. (You can find more information about these designs on the wiki [1].) Searching for a contact should, ideally, produce results from contacts, chat, mail, documents, etc. Generally I'd expect people to jump to these apps to start different types of communication - go to mail to start a mail, chat to do IM, and so on. The second thing to consider is how we intend to use context menus more generally in the shell. It might not make sense to have a context menu here if we don't have them for other types of search results. tl;dr - could be a nice feature, but I'd like to make sure it integrates well with the rest of the shell search design. [1] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/Search
Another thing to consider: I'd like to remove all built-in search providers (except for application search) in favor of remote providers provided by the corresponding application itself (like Documents now). It is of course possible to extend the protocol to allow context menus, but it seems like a bad idea doing it for a single provider.
And what do you thing about using action keywords when searching? Maybe prefixed with '+' or something? So typing something like: "+chat allan <enter>" would open a chat window with you. I'd personally use a lot at leat +chat +call and +mail
Maybe we could "split up" the search results at some level. Like, if your search only returns a single contact, but that contact happens to have both a chat address and an email address, maybe the result could be two items, on for the chat and one for the email? Just an idea...
The current idea is that empathy, evolution, ... provide their own search results to the shell like contacts does, and users can configure what providers they are interested in and in which order results should appear. If we want to implement something like this anyway for contacts, it'll need to be implemented in the application, as the internal contacts provider is gone.
I still think we are best to provide the requested search functionality by other applications providing their own search providers. As such, I don't think we want to keep this open (but please feel free to argue otherwise!)