I just put together some toughts about a Gnome instant messaging system, as I already spoke about in some others articles. Here are some of them, in the form of technical and synthetic stuffs. Later on I'll make some extensive text explaining my motivations about all this (UPDATE: here it is). Comments are welcome!

Communication Manager Daemon

  • central part of the system
  • manage connections to the configured networks
  • manage chat windows
  • communicate with all others module: gives statuses, transfer messages, etc.

Communication System Applet

  • provide means of setting user's current status
  • provide access to a classical contact list window
  • provide a menu with favourite contacts
mockups

Applet mockup

Settings Applet

  • this is the place where it is possible to configure the IM networks used, the preferences ("connect at startup", file sending prefs, etc.)
  • this is also the place where it is possible to see the status of the connections
mockups
Settings panel mockup

Evolution-data-server, Contact-lookup-applet

One-Contact Applet

  • provide an easy way to access quickly a contact: it's an icon in the taskbar show his status, and allowing to start chat by clicking and sending file by drag & drop
  • this idea comes from here, it's Calum Benson's idea