First Milestone of the Awesometab has landed!
Awesometab is the project name for a tab developed byNihanth Subramanyaduring theGoogle Summer of Code 2013 (viaMozilla) which allows toquickly start the conversation you want to start. The suggestions will be basedon several parameters like frequency and recency of previous conversations andwill show the most likely results when you open the new conversation-tab. Itwill also include already ongoing conversations (Switch to conversation) andsuggestions for multi user chats such asIRC channels andXMPP chatrooms on theservers that you’re connected to.
What’s this milestone that has landed already?
After problems with the sheer size of the patch during last years GSoC project,we decided to split this year’s projects into smaller parts that can land assoon as they are ready.
So far a filterable contact list in a tab has landed that can easily be openedusing the common shortcut ofCtrl+T forNew Tab (from both the contact listor a conversation window) or by clicking the likewise familiarNew Tab-buttonin the tab bar.
New conversation tab, list filtered for contacts starting with letter f
It features a search bar at top of the tab content which allows to refine theresults. It currently matches the entered name against each part of thecontact’s names but will do more later (see next section).
Contacts are displayed similar to results in Firefox’ awesomebar while retainingthe familiar look of the conversation header with the contact icon and statusindicator at the left and the contact name and status message to the right ofit. Additionally the tags of the contact are displayed, indicated by the sameicons as Firefox uses for tags on the Awesomebar.
Starting a conversation is as easy as single clicking on the result or selectingan item with the keyboard and pressing Enter – a middle click opens the newconversation in background instead while keeping the new conversation tabvisible, just in case that you need to start more than one conversation!
And what’s next?
The next step (already under development!) will be further improving this listby integrating already ongoing conversations (Switch to tab/conversation).We’d also like to include a way to filter the list by tags and to highlight thetext that matches the filter like the Awesomebar does.
Later on a ranking algorithm will be introduced and tweaked to show the mostimportant results first instead of the alphabetically sorted list that youcurrently get when opening the tab.
These changes are most likely going to be integrated as soon as they are readyand reviewed, so make sure you have anightly build and update frequently!
I’m really happy to see how well this project is going, I’m already enjoying howeasy it became to start a conversation using the filterable contact list. I’mlooking forward to actually see the conversations I most likely want to startright away!
Thanks, Nihanth, it’s really great work that you’re doing here!