[sldev] Roadmap: 1.19.0 Viewer

[Celierra Darling]

On Jan 9, 2008 7:48 PM, Argent Stonecutter <secret.argent at gmail.com> wrote:

> ...
> Why waste space in the tab bar on an empty chat?
> </index.html>
>

I sorta agree with this.  I think that the root problem being solved (with
re-implementing 'passive listening') is that tab space is quite cramped in
the Communicate window right now.  It definitely doesn't hold enough tabs to
afford having one for every watched group (right now, I can only have about
four tabs on screen before it starts scrolling).

It's possible (but I'm not certain) that being able to accommodate enough
tabs (i.e. through truncated names for groups, or two or three rows of tabs)
would be a decent solution (along with auto-join-on-login).  I suppose that
there's only so many groups that one would want to have chat with...  And a
bonus with just tinkering with tabs is that the way to temporarily leave a
channel (until next login) is obvious - close the tab.

In this context, the suggestion's just another way of reclaiming space.  I
would suggest thinking of the "passive listening" mode as a way to hide the
tab for that group into the groups list, analogous to closing a person's IM
window at the end of a conversation (which hides the IM window into the
contact list).  This saves the space that would be taken up from having a
minimized window (in this case, inactive background tab) for an inactive
session.  I think this is the smoothest change for current users.  But then
we lose the ability to temporarily stop getting messages from a group chat
(unless you build that feature in, too), and there's the whole problem of
how randomly encountering a group IM window is jarring to newcomers to SL.

(For the function of seeing which group chats you are listening to, I'm
sorta assuming that the Groups tab would be made to look more like the
Friends tab, with an icon showing whether or not you're subscribing to each
group's chat channel.  This would take the place of the function of
minimized windows/inactive tabs.)

I'm not sure which is better; there's benefits and pitfalls to both.  Just
trying to put more ideas out there...

Celierra
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