genesis-devs team mailing list archive

[David Castellanos <davidcaste@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Frederick!

I've just uploaded to Launchpad a very first implementation of account
management. There are some things to improve, but for now it's able to
add, delete and modify accounts.

>> I have a
>> screen called "Account Properties", which is used to modify the
>> settings of an account. I just realized that "Account Properties" and
>> "Account Wizard" share most of the source code, and its functionality
>> is almost the same. What about if we get rid of the "Account Wizard"
>> screen? "Account Properties" could be used instead, just like Mail
>> Notification[1] does.
>
> I’m not sure about this. The benefit of a wizard/assistant is that it
> ensures that all necessary fields are filled out. If you just use a
> dialog with several tabs, people could fill out only the first tab and
> omit the rest.

Good point :-)

> Wouldn’t it be possible to re-use code and ui definitions to implement
> both? I’m not sure this is practically doable, but maybe one could split
> the several pages (assistant) and tabs (properties dialog) into separate
> ui files and create the assistant/dialog from the same UI information.

Mmm, I'm not so experienced in PyGTK to do that, but it's be a great
idea. Undoubtedly both screens share most of the elements and
functionality. I'll add it to my TODO list.

> How does one select the active account? If we include a radio button as
> one column, we could get rid of the “select server” menu. Once syncing
> multiple accounts is implemented, we could change this into a checkbox,
> like it currently is in MS.

My idea was to implement multiple account synchronization altogether,
because I have it already implemented in MS11 and it isn't too
difficult to backport it to Genesis. I'm not satisfied with the way I
implemented 'enable/disable account'  in MS11 because SE doesn't offer
a clean way to disable an account. I considered an account as
'enabled' if at least one of its sources were synchronized, and
'disabled' otherwise. The 'enabled' to 'disabled' transition was clear
because it was only necessary to disable the account origins, but the
'disabled' to 'enabled' transition wasn't as simple. What sources
should be enabled?, there is no simple way of remembering what origins
where previously enabled. I implemented this feature because the
original MS had it, and one of the development requirements was to
support at least all the features that had the old client.

IMHO, this feature isn't as important because if an user doesn't want
to synchronize an account, he can delete it or manually disable its
sources. If in the future SE adds support for easily enable or disable
an account, we can add support for it.

>> Another option I thought about
>> was to automatically create account names of the form 'XXX@YYY', where
>> XXX is the username and YYY the service. For example, 'david@Google'.
>> But I haven't implemented this, it's just an idea.
>
> Yes, that sounds good. Do you think it still should be possible to
> change the account name? There might be situations where one wants to
> have two or more accounts with the same service (e.g., syncing more than
> one calendar). In Evolution, the name of the account is asked for at the
> last step of the assistant. One could do this similar, and pre-fill that
> field based on the given information.

I had not thought of that. My first idea was to do something similar
to Mail Notification (I really love this program!! :-P). In MN you can
manually change the account name, or accept the 'XXX@YYY' proposal.
Right now, we're able to change the name of an account... although the
way I've implemented it is somewhat tricky because SE doesn't support
renaming accounts: I delete the old account and create another with
the new name. About the account name in the last page of the wizard,
it could be implemented too when the assistant is refined. I'll also
add it to my TODO list :-)

> Just one more comment on the account properties in MS sync: There you
> added a third tab allowing to sync accounts in a different mode. While
> we should definitely allow this (and the current “special sync” menu in
> Genesis really is far from being optimal), I think this is not the best
> place for this. In a properties dialog, I as a user would expect
> permanent settings for an account, not running single actions.

You're right, it's very weird. It's for the same reason I've said
before, the original MS had that feature... I didn't find a better
place for it :-S

> My suggestion would be to add a button to the account manager with
> something like “synchronize”. This button should pop up a menu that
> allows to select the mode of sync for this single sync (like a ComboBox,
> but it shouldn’t actually change its label).

That's a great idea!! It makes much more sense.

> Since four buttons next to each other, it might be worth thinking about
> using a vertical layout for these.

Personally I prefer the horizontal layout, but it's a matter of making
two mockups and choose one. With GTK/Builder is very easy to build a
prototype for this kind of things.

It won't give me time to finish in this weekend, but I'll try the next one.


Cheers!!! :-)

P.D. One little thing! Please watch out to send to CC the genesis-dev
mailing list, because by default GMail sends the email to only one of
us. Thank you!!! :-)