Bits and pieces about free software and various other things.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Telepathy Support for Gedit-Collaboration

During the last months I was working on telepathy support for gedit-collaboration, a gedit plugin. The plugin allows you to work collaboratively on files via an infinote server. The idea of giving it support for telepathy was to get rid of the extra infrastructure needed (infinote server) and collaborate directly with your buddies over XMPP.

The branch is not finished yet but its functional. Thus I am looking for volunteers to test it and to give me feedback. Since I'm not a UI expert (more a UI non-expert), I really need some good ideas for the UI part, which right now follows the way gedit-collaboration handles infinote servers. That approach is not really intuitive for direct collaboration. So if you have an idea, please don't hesitate.



You can find the branch with my work here: http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/kaserf/gedit-collaboration.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/add-telepathy-support

I also opened a bug to collect all the feedback and ideas: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646312




A big thanks to Collabora Ltd. for sponsoring this work, to Jesse van den Kieboom (gedit-collaboration maintainer) and Armin Burgmeier (Infinote maintainer)

17 comments:

Unknown said...

Does ctrl-z works?

Flex said...

yes, undo works.

Anonymous said...

Really nice :)

There are so many great telepathy based services, though I know no-one to use them with :(

I hope the adoption really gets off with GNOME 3.

Anonymous said...

Great work!

Two things would be great:
- an icon in the tab to indicate a document that was changed by someone in the background
- the avatar of a person in the list of people.

Is there possibility to open a chat window by clicking on the persons name?

Anonymous said...

Telepathy with XMPP/Jabber would be a nice replacement for IRC.

It would be nice for developers to use functions like gedit collaboration and maybe collaboration with git in a similar way.

We had some relatively complex workarounds for limitations in the IRC protocol and IRC clients. Telepathy and XMPP might make it more effective.

Jos Poortvliet said...

This is awesome! With some luck we (the openSUSE marketing team) can get rid of the unreliable piratepad and use this tool... BTW do you happen to know if anything happens or might happen on the KDE side for this? Half our team are KDE users and while installing GEdit is not an issue I bet some prefer to use it in Kate or so. And while on the subject of other apps, could this work in LibreOffice or Caligre, or is that too complicated? I know some Caligre devs are working on collaborative stuff, would that work via Telepathy?

Flex said...

@jospoortvliet:

there are people working on a telepathy lib for qt.

infinote (where most of this work should land in the end) is platform independent. you can write some qt widgets as there are some gtk widgets in it right now.

the rest is just exposing the functions of the library in a UI of your choice. In fact the work needed on gedit-collaboration itself, to make it work with telepathy was not much. There needs to be done more though, to have a better UI.

Jos Poortvliet said...

@flex good to know, thanks! Now let's hope someone picks this up on the KDE side :D

Meanwhile, I'll keep an eye on this, I guess it has a decent chance of being in the next GNOME, eg 3.2? If so, I'll make sure the team installs and uses Gedit with this as soon as it is available :D

Anonymous said...

I think this could be awesome, like gobby, but the problem is that gobby needs some hosting service. I think gedit with telepathy could be cool if the devs are using out both side of the software capabilities. In additionally suse has great tools for collaborating - just they long time forgotten that. Once they have created one pair of software that capable to share tasks, and notes and more. It's called taskque and - sorry - I couldn't remember the other, but it was presented at conference. Combine that with video/audio conference, and some rich text editing possibility, and let it be saved/shared online to the cloud....

Anonymous said...

Forgot to mention dropbox integration, and compression and ciphering... sorry

pbrobinson said...

Will this interoperate with the collaboration support in Abiword?

Unknown said...

@probinson: I'm afraid it wont. I'm not sure what abicollab is using to do the real collaboration, but as far as I know it is NOT libinfinity (which I'm using)

Flex said...

(This happens when some guys are still logged in @ google on my computer :D the comment was meant to be from me)

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Marc Mauri Alloza said...

Hey,

I'm the kate-collaboration guy. I'm just staring with this and I would have an idea about how you did it. Maybe we can make gedit-collaboration and kate-collaboration compatible.

Flex said...

@Marc

that sounds like a plan! why don't you write me a mail (feli.kaser@collabora.com) and we can discuss it via mail? or in bugzilla on the bug I reported?

Marc Mauri Alloza said...

@Flex I've written in the bugzilla.

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