[Design] Jabber in Chandler

[Jeffrey Harris]

Hi Folks,

I've been thinking to myself,

"What activities do I do that Chandler could plausibly replace soon?"

Bonus points for replacing any applications or windows I have open most
of the time.

*A Modest Proposal*
For preventing the clients of poor outdated IM protocols from being a
burthen to their users, and for making something beneficial to the IM
using public. (see http://www.grundskyld.dk/2-modest.html)

Seriously, though.  On one monitor at my desk, I have an email client
open, an IRC client open, and a Jabber client.  Eventually, all of those
programs should live in Chandler, but I'm wondering if perhaps we could
get a larger user community, faster, by
A) moving OSAF's real-time discussions from IRC to XMPP/Jabber
(transitioning using the XMPP -> IRC transport at
http://xmpppy.sourceforge.net/irc/)
B) Implementing a really bare bones Jabber client in Chandler, figuring
out a bunch of UI issues we need to solve for email on the way

This is appealing to me for a variety of reasons.

- I like Jabber
- I think IM is more forgiving, and just plain easier to get to a usable
state, than email
- I suspect most Chandler developers are less attached to their IM
client than they are to their email client
- We could do invitations over Jabber (instead of over email?  In
addition to over email?), because Jabber servers queue messages if
you're offline
- I think it would be incredibly cool for Chandler early adopters to
have a "Help!" button they could press that would connect them, inside
Chandler, directly to an IRC/Jabber channel developers were regularly
logged into

Challenges off the top of my head this would raise:

- IM really needs to be able to notify you if you're pinged.  But to
make reminders really useful, I think we already need to develop toast
popups, beeps, etc., integrated with OS mechanisms for such things
- It's tolerable to be constantly restarting your calendar when
dogfooding, it's not tolerable to be constantly restarting your IM client
- Jabber queuing is akin to POP, once you've received a message in a
client, it's deleted from the server.  If you use a non-Chandler Jabber
client and receive a Chandler invitation, Chandler won't ever get it
- Chandler currently has lots of modal dialogs and operations which
block UI refresh.  This would be way more annoying in an IM client

Just to be clear, I'm *not* in favor of starving email in favor of IM.
I could be convinced a Jabber client is really hard and features
developed for IM don't have as much overlap with email as I think, in
which case I'd agree I should let go of the idea.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey