Been playing a lot with various instant messengers this week, and generally being
frustrated by their limitations. Got to thinking how neat it
might be if GNOME just had a “contact” applet that you could add to your
panel, one for each person you cared about– then you could arrange
them spatially to suit you, rather than having them in a meaningless
list. The icon (perhaps the person’s photo) could show their
online status, clicking it would open a regular IM window, and you
could right click to do the usual other stuff (send them an email, schedule
a meeting or whatever). Drop a file on their head to send it to
them. That kind of thing.
If Davyd’s idea takes off and the whole panel becomes a notification area, you’d have your own action-packed
desktop hackergotchi cartoon whenever somebody IM’d or /msged you, or
posted a new entry in their blog, or did anything else you were interested in (that you could write some sort of plugin for, anyway):
It all falls down a bit when you want to do something with a group of
multiple contacts though (email them all, arrange a meeting at a time that
suits them all)… ah well.