I am working on Folks2 when I have a bit of free time. In short it is a rewrite from scratch of Folks in C with a daemon/db to remember who is merged with who. The goal is to be faster and being able to load individuals separately instead of having to load them all.
Recently, I’ve been writing libfolks2-roster, a GTK library providing widgets to display a contact list and contact details. It is using awesome GTK 3.10 GtkListBox, GtkStack and GtkSearchBar. The main issue I’m facing now is GtkListBox slowness, it really needs a model to create only visible widgets.
(Yes it is ubuntu theme, I’m usually using unity but video recording didn’t work)
I noticed the search entry appears at the bottom. I think the current pattern followed by the GNOME design team is to have it on top. Try Ctrl + F in Epiphany for a example.
I also noticed that clicking on your Facebook contact triggers a GNOME Shell chat area instead of opening an Empathy chat window. What black magic are you using? I’m sure a lot of people would like that to be the default behaviour. 🙂
The search bar is not part of the lib widgets, it’s in the demo app. It can be put anywhere. The search position is currently a complete mess, epiphany (3.8 here) and firefox put it at bottom, gedit is top-right, empathy is top, Contacts is top left and always visible… So I don’t really see a GNOME design here 😉
For chat being handled by gnome-shell directly, that’s actually the default behaviour in telepathy. But empathy explicitly ask to handle itself the chats started from its contact list. Dunno what’s the best tbh.
Epiphany 3.10 has it at the top, and has been made to be so in theory because that’s the GNOME design (though I like gedit’s top-right better).