Re: Away Message Preference Panel

On Nov 4, 2003, at 10:59 AM, Alan Humpherys wrote:
> I have been working on the Away Status messages a bit, and have come 
> up with a new preference panel which groups together all of the away 
> message preferences (from General, ChatWindows, and Appearance) and 
> adds preferences for Initial Status (invisible login) and an Idle 
> Timeout Delay.
>
> <awaypanel.jpg>
>
> I would like to add this panel to our 1.0 preference panes, but I have 
> 2 problems:
>
> 1) I don't have a good icon for "Away Status" preferences.  (While 
> we're at it, the icon we use in the Buddies Window for away status 
> isn't intuitive either...  We need a new one in both places)

Why not use the post it note? We now have a Status menu in the menubar. 
I don't think we need to worry about the head and shoulders icon for 
1.0. Let's let people work on themes and see what they come up with.

> 2) If I add the panel, there isn't room for the icon on the 2 rows of 
> preference icons we have now....  We don't want to change the width 
> (because of all the NIB changes that would make) so do we create a 
> third row, or get rid of something else?

In the Fireside chat we had in July we talked about having more 
categories for preferences. I don't want to go into full detail (I've 
emailed the transcript to you), but the gist of it was this:

- the problem is that our prefs are too hard to locate
- having more well defined pref panes seemed like the solution to this. 
One way of doing this is breaking up the larger pref panes into smaller 
ones where appropriate. Another is to kill pref panes which are vague, 
such as General.

> If we are looking to get rid of some things....  Here are 2 ideas:
>
> 	General - This has only 4 options which could probably be moved to 
> other panels

Some of these options were agreed to be useless. Some might be moved.

> 	Colors - I know we just added this one (and I love it), But could we 
> do a tab within a tab and have Colors become a tab under Appearance 
> Preferences.

No... having a Colors pane is exactly what we need to simplify.

Here's why:
Where's that pref to set the text color... Chat Windows? No, Appearance?
Colors. Simple, and there's no question where the pref goes. We need 
that. Also, I really want to avoid doubly nested tab views wherever 
possible.

> Can folks give me feedback ASAP?  (And if any of you have a good icon 
> for "Away Status" let me know!)

We need to add another group, possibly two. We already need it to add 
the Network pref and there was also talk of splitting out the GPG and 
Buddy visibility settings into a Privacy pane. As we are fast 
approaching our intended loc freeze I don't know how much of this we 
can accomplish, but I believe the Colors pref is an improvement over 
having this in different places and reduces the effort to find prefs 
later over the previous arrangement. Removing General is not enough to 
fit everything we want so we need to split things up more.

As I said above, I believe this will help us.

-Jason