Gnome contacts, Empathy and communication

So, Gnome 3.2 is going to include a new application: Gnome contacts. This is good news indeed and the application looks good as well. I guess this means that Evolution will be able to use (at least eventually) Gnome contacts instead of its own address book. Secretly I hope for a future with a simplified Evolution, quite possibly split into several different applications, but hush, please don’t tell anybody.

Now, I’ve been thinking about something. If we store our contacts in Gnome contacts (well, actually in Evolution Data Server, but contacts is its front-end), will we be able to also use this instead of Empathy’s buddy list? I’d like to not have to maintain two different lists of contacts, if possible. Notice that I don’t have anything against Empathy, just that I feel that the buddy list part of Empathy would no longer be necessary with an application that provides a contacts list.

I remember some time ago there was a lot of talk of a people brower. When I first heard of this I remember visualizing something like a file manager, but with people and groups instead of files and folders. A photo, a name and the obligatory context menu. In my dreams, I remember being able to drag and drop documents onto a contact and have that document magically delivered to that person without me knowing or even needing to worry about how it happened. That UI that I saw in my dreams may have had its flaws, but I think there was quite a lot of interesting discussion going on at the time, and I’m not sure what happened to the ideas.

Most of the time, I really could care less what underlying protocols I use to communicate with my friends. If I want to chat, just let me know that the person is online and initiate a chat. Who cares whether we are using XMPP, Yahoo, or anything else? If I don’t like Yahoo, then I don’t sign up for an account on Yahoo. Problem solved, I will never communicate using Yahoo’s protocol.

If I want to send a document to somebody, couldn’t it be as simple as just dropping the document on an entry in an address book application? Couldn’t some service be in charge of finding out the best path? “Is the person on the local network and has a samba share that I can access?” No. “Is the person online using any protocol that supports file transfers?” No. “Okay, then I’ll just attach it to a plain ‘ol email and send it off!”

I might want to discuss with several people at once. Instead of me having to waste time trying to find a protocol that supports multi-user chats (or chat rooms, or whatever you want to call it) that every single person that I want to include in the conference happens to use, isn’t this typically the type of thing that software should handle far better? Find it for me, and let me concentrate on the discussion instead.

I’m sure I just felt somebody think “I see, you want to dumb down Gnome even more!” Well, yes maybe. It could be that my life is become more complex in many different ways, so I want a Gnome that takes more decisions for me, giving me more time to worry about more important things. It could equally well be that I’m growing older, and finding it more and more difficult to keep a hundred  things in my head at once. It could also be that I’m actually growing dumber and therefor need a Gnome the degrades together with me, although I hope that is not the case, because I was probably pretty dumb to begin with (I have no memories of Einstein moments during my childhood). Seriously, however, I don’t feel that simplifying the lives of its users necessarily means dumbing down Gnome.

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