Gossip Updates: I have spent some time scratching a few of those itches with regards to the Gossip user interfaces recently. Most notably the group chat join dialog and the status presets dialog:

I have been looking for an excuse to try out the new GtkCellRendererCombo and thought this might be a good exercise for the reader. This is not the final cut, still needs some work…

As for the “Join Group Chat” dialog, I have been thinking long and hard about the best way to do it and really am still not happy with what I came up with.

The result is not a much different from what Mikael originally had it is just a little cleaner and smarter. This is what I came up with:

So basically these are the things we might do in the future[*] and things that we currently support:

– Join a group chat favourite
– Join multiple group chat favourites *
– Add/Edit/Delete a favourite
– Browse chat rooms *

What would be really nice is if you could do all this on one dialog. Typically applications tend to have a list on one window somewhere and another dialog to add or edit entries on the list. While this might be OK, I can’t help but think it there must be a way to use the same entries (for Server, Room, etc) when joining a custom group chat too. If you use a GtkTreeView to show favourites or possibly a list of rooms on a server (when browsing) then how do you fit a set of entries to join into a custom group chat on the same window? Perhaps that is a separate dialog?

The whole point is, from a usability perspective, how do we best present this to the user?

New Graphics Card
After putting up with my old GeForce Ti4800 for some time now and given the advent of games like Half Life and Doom 3, I have bought myself a new Galaxy GeForce 6600 GT from Overclockers UK. The most important thing for me is the noise reduction. My current card can be heard from the next room with the doors open and is the only noisy fan in my Shuttle.

Notice Of Marriage
Tuesday my good lady and I visited the local civil registrar to declare our notice of marriage. So now we are all geared up for our big day (which should be) Saturday August 27th. Thankfully, the registrar confirmed for me that everything I have to say will be repeated after her

Interestingly, when you declare your intent to marry it is put up on a notice board for 15 days – this is for people to object if they have reason to.

Gossip Transports & GnomeMeeting
Gossip’s HEAD branch now has the worst of Micke’s and my code since we merged both our branches in on the weekend

The transports seem to be shaping up nicely though, hopefully now that it is on HEAD it will get tested more and we can determin problems early ready for 0.9.

Julien PUYDT has also spent a lot of time working on patches to get GnomeMeeting operational via Gossip. Bad timing with the recent merge and everything, but it should get into Gossip sooner or later.