[JDEV] Jabber Client Design Tutorial

[Julian Missig]

Julian Fitzell wrote:

> On 24/09/2001 at 9:57 PM Julian Missig wrote:
> 
> But, even if a user doesn't intent to log on multiple times simultaneously, a description of where they are currently logged in from is still useful.  Surely it is clear to a user that they are entering a description of what computer they are logging in from and when they look at another user in their roster they can see where they are logged in from?... even if they don't understand the concept of resources and how they interact.
> 
> If I gave a Jabber client to an inexperienced Jabber user and it said enter a description of where you are connecting from, they would enter "Home" or "Laptop" or something and then they would never have to worry about it again.
> 
> Julian (the other one)
> 


Well, in the few tests I did, whenever I asked for something like that, they would turn around and ask me if I meant their country or their city or what. However, this was most likely an issue of wording which deserves further investigation. Asking the user to enter a description of where they're connecting from doesn't solve very much since they still don't get a complete understanding of resources.


Also keep in mind that nowhere does it state that a resource must be a 
physical location. If I'm running multiple clients on one machine, I 
think it would be useful to know which two clients they are using.

What happens if the user sets up, say, sjabber and Gabber on their 
machine, and both clients follow this question format? The user might 
enter "Home" into both clients - hey, they're both at the same location, 
why would you want to give them different locations, it's the same 
machine, even! Then the user would not understand why they cannot 
connect with both at the same time, and you have to force feed them the 
description of a resource, and maybe they'll get it - maybe they won't 
and just go on thinking you can only connect once with one Jabber account.

Not to mention that fact that I'm not particularly a fan of always using 
a resource to describe location. It describes your session in a unique 
way from the others. In the future, multiple Jabber sessions from one 
physical location will become more and more common.


Julian
-- 
email: julian at jabber.org
jabber:julian at jabber.org