[ticker-dev] Re: channel subscription rules

[Phillips, Matthew]

> While Sticker may be a model citizen in implementing many of these new
> protocol features (they seem to have a tendency to go from 
> Sticker to the
> protocol rather than the other way around)

I hope the impression isn't that I'm doing the equivalent of what Netscape did to HTML ;) My work with Sticker seems to be the most active in the ticker client arena right now (other people having moved on to more important things ;), so it shouldn't be too surprising that a lot of new ideas are coming from here.

> most of the other 
> clients are
> either very slow to implement them or have no plans to 
> implement them. For
> example, I believe Ted doesn't think XTickertape should implement the
> presence protocol, or even move away from text file 
> configuration. Unless
> these UI changes actually have some chance of happening, it's 
> only fair to
> make the protocol itself friendlier as well. (And Matthew, 
> who's off in
> Sticker-land, still sees the need for case-insensitive group names).

While it can hard as a client author to make observations without appearing biased, I'm going to go ahead and potentially insert foot A into mouth B anyway.

I think it's possible, likely even, that some of the people on this list who have been using ticker from The Beginning, and now have it built into their limbic reflexes, don't fully appreciate how much _integrated_ presence adds to the way tickertape works. It's not just a new feature tacked on the side: it makes a significant difference to be able to see what channels are being used or who's listening to a given channel, and hence the minimum audience for a message.

Being able to see a person is there and send them a message directly (and being warned if they're offline or away) is also a key new feature and used a lot here at DSTO: probably more than 80% of the chat traffic here is person-to-person (for reference, we have about 25-30 regular users right now). (interestingly, a number of people use subscriptions to look for words of interest across groups and it's not uncommon for people to pop up in previously one-on-one conversations). Other things, such as being able to see that someone is "Replying..." allows you to stop "talking over" them or to see that they probably saw the message you just sent them.

By doing fairly simple things like putting presence roster displays in the messages window and displaying known groups in the ticker group subscription widget you can gain a great deal of situational awareness. I realise that there may actually be no effort available to add presence support to, say, xtickertape but if there were, even integrating a minimum implementation would make a big difference methinks.

> I believe Ted doesn't think XTickertape should implement the
> presence protocol, or even move away from text file 
> configuration.

Just out of interest: is this a philosophical issue or just a lack of time needed to build GUI's?

Matthew.