Since our first alpha release of OneTeam, we have worked your feedback. We have just released a version alpha2.

Here is the changelog:
  * Auto-update
  * History browsing in chat tabs (arrow at the top “Load more messages from history”)
  * Handle JIDs without “@”
  * Growl notifications on Mac
  * Make ctrl+tab switch between chat tabs
  * Fixed login issue for account with non-latin characters in JID
  * Fixed problem with occasionally missing initiate call icon
  * Fixed more minor bugs

Please feedback on this thread, about the alpha2 release!

Hi,

so I just got oneteam for 10 minutes right now. And… I already have some feedback, though they may change overtime, this is my “first impression” (it counts! ;-). If someone already gave them in other topics, sorry, I admit I barely read the previous topic.

- When you start oneteam and are at the “sign in” page, you cannot quit it. No button labelled “close” or anything (at least no visible) and not even using your window manager method (usual shortcuts like alt-f4, or the small cross on top right of window, etc.). Only solution is killing the processus.
Note that I don’t ask to add a useless “close” button, but the usual window close methods made available by the window manager should work.

- When I am already signed in (the roster opened and everything) and that I quit (actions > quit), this time it quits… apparently. No window, no icon in the task bar, but the process is still there. Again I needed to kill it by hand. To be fair, it happened only twice (out of 5 or 6 tries) and I am not sure how to reproduce the bug. I tried to redo the few things I did when it occurred but did not find a bug trigger. So I could not trace it.

By the way, there is no debug mode? strace is too verbose.

- So first start… you get a window which asks for a username and a password… and no server? It startled me.
Ok so this is enterprise dedicated, let’s say that a company would have already set its own server by default. But still for me this is strange start: an email, you don’t separate the login from the server, why would you here? Probably a design choice, and I cannot say I agree with it.

- So I go into startup settings > connection. And it asks in the same page server, port, resource, priority, etc. So what I will say here is a very personal view because I have my very own design choices for personal projects, but my opinion has been asked so…
I know everybody does the same, but I think this is a bad idea. In XMPP we made so that with a well configured server, everything should be easy for the user sometimes to sign in (on an open server), at least to log in. Stuffs like port, priority should not, in my opinion, be mixed with the server. The server is, as I said earlier, a base for the jid. Everybody knows one’s server, everybody needs to fill this part. The rest is advanced stuffs, which should not be touched by most users. So I would not mix the server information with obscure stuffs that most people don’t understand.

- When you write “SSL connection”, you mean the old deprecated SSL method (standardized on a separate port at the time) or the new TLS method (which in my opinion should not be asked. I don’t see any reason why not using this feature if the server proposes it).

- In the login page, if I click “New Account”, I get an error pop-up with the text « The file jar:file:///home/jehan/prog/oneteam/oneteam/chrome/oneteam.jar!/content/account.xul cannot be found. Please check the location and try again. »
I unzipped oneteam.jar, there is indeed no account.xul in content/. Not written yet in the alpha or forgotten?
Then for some reason, after closing the error pop up, it creates an empty window labelled oneteam as well (as it is empty, it is at minimum size and I saw this only because I had 2 oneteam icon in the task bar).

- If I make a password or username mistake, I get two popup errors on a row. The first tells me « Invalid response from server (server down or misconfigured) ». When closing a second appears telling me « Error during connection. (Wrong username or password?) ». I would say that the first popup is wrong and should not be displayed.

- “Sign In”: very strange choice of word. Is this button to sign in or to login? I wondered. I thought it would do both (try to login if the jid already exists, sign in otherwise), so I tried both on a server accepting inline jid creation. And it does not sign in, only login. So I would say this is a textual bug.

- Enough for the Login page. Now I logged, the interface appears, it is nice looking. I like how you present the contacts. I would have though a regret on the default choice of showing all contacts (even offline). It is easily modifiable, but as I said… first impression. As many people I have too many contacts for them to be shown efficiently in such a list way (even though I group them of course).

- I don’t see the avatar of all the contacts (let’s say I see little more than half). Is it because OneTeam doesn’t deal with the different ways to store one’s avatar? (yeah I know this topic is a mess, between some vcard based avatar, iq based avatar, and an extension dedicated to user avatar, meant to deprecate the other ways).

- The chat window is nice looking. Minor note: the “:p” or “:-p” doesn’t make a smiley. Is it because it is not a corporate appropriate smiley? :-(

- When I restart a conversation with someone, the history of last discussion shows up. This is nice, but the view appears on top of the discussion (so you don’t see newly typed messages), even when you write something. It should appear at the bottom, in my opinion (and we can scroll on top if we need to, but anyway we don’t always need to).
- In preference, if I uncheck “display avatars in rosters” (just to test), I still have avatars in the roster.

- unchecking “show system tray icon” also does not seem to work.

- I don’t understand what means “notify about other clients with higher priority”.

This is it for now. Hope this helps you.
Bye.

Ok so for the “username” point, I just understood. What you call username is in fact the full jid. I think this is again a rather approximate naming here, at least for me it was, considering I did not understand at first.

So for the next point (mixing server with advanced configuration), it becomes irrelevant as a consequence.

Except from this, I forgot one point: isn’t it possible to deactivate the very very annoying notification bubbles? Especially if the client is corporate oriented, I still remember with a smile colleagues forgetting to close their Skype account while making presentations, hence notifications suddenly appearing atop the presentation on the wall. :D
Anyway if it were for me (but I know many people would think differently), I would even consider that these notification should be deactivated by default because that’s just so annoying. And I would also advise to make it customizable. Like for instance I don’t want to be notified every time someone in my roster connects or disconnects. Oh and like when I connect myself, my screen has been suddenly flooded, nearly filled with dozen of notification for each of my contacts being online.

Very interesting comments Jehan, thanks!

I agree with most of your feedback, though I have a question :)

@ “Sign in” - this is pretty standard across website, they have either “Sing in” (like Google) or “Login” (like Facebook). Opposite to “Sign up” which is actually the “Register”/“Create account”. So I’m not sure how much of a bug is this ? :)

@ “New account” - it indeed isn’t implemented yet.

@ rest - very useful points. I’d like to see them implemented too, and I think when OneTeam comes to a final version (1.0 that is) all these problems will be solved.

Thanks again and let us know if you find some more :)

Hi,

hum… yes so maybe “sign in” and “login” are synonyms then. I guess that if Google uses so, they know better English than I do.

Funny note: in fact Google guys are melomanes, aren’t they? They need to sing in order to use the services (read again your post in order to understand the joke).

And you are welcome, someone wanted me to test the client for weeks now, I just thought I could give it a try. But I cannot test and use it as my main client as long as the notifications cannot be either disabled or filtered. This is too annoying and I really cannot use my computer if any time that someone log in or log log off, it notifies me (which can mean a lot of time).
Bye.

Jehan - 28 April 2010 01:04 PM

Hi,
Funny note: in fact Google guys are melomanes, aren’t they? They need to sing in order to use the services (read again your post in order to understand the joke).

Haha good one :D yes, i tend to type too fast ;)

Jehan - 28 April 2010 01:04 PM

And you are welcome, someone wanted me to test the client for weeks now, I just thought I could give it a try. But I cannot test and use it as my main client as long as the notifications cannot be either disabled or filtered. This is too annoying and I really cannot use my computer if any time that someone log in or log log off, it notifies me (which can mean a lot of time).
Bye.

We’ll try to fix this with an option in the settings for the next version. I understand how this can be annoying.

Oh 2 other points:

1/ the conversation window is somehow slow to scroll/update when a new message is added (whether you sent it or you receive it). I guess the performance decreases when the discussion has become pretty long. So performance issue. I don’t know how much XUL is responsible of this kind of issue or whether you can improve this. Because how I see it, the length of the history should not be an issue, considering that what is shown in the window is always the same size in the end.

2/ I see there is not much done yet on the history part (I mean, you just have an history by date and user, no search tool, etc.) but if you want an advice: design it well. This is a bad point in all the clients (more or less, but none has really an “excellent” search tool), though it could be a killer feature. Not seen first, but in a daily use, being able to “intelligently” and easily find a discussion is very useful.
I could give more details, but it would take too much time here. Just this advice then: don’t consider the history as a secondary feature: it is a major feature in modern and evolved use.

Edit: ok OneTeam just crashed (segmentation fault, pretty bad) at the instant I sent a message. But I don’t know if it was related or just a coincidence because I could send it again after restart (it had time to be saved in history before the segfault) and it did not segfault. So if relation there is, only indirect it was.
Sorry this is not an efficient bug report, but without any kind of debug mode, I cannot do much (a segfault can be caused in so many ways).

Hi a few more comments:

- I would advice to deport the “automatically connect at startup” option into the basic first window (the sign in window, another checkbox under the “remember password” one probably). This is typically the kind of option that most (except when not connecting on one’s computer and maybe few other cases) people want to activate by default in their client. Therefore it is annoying to have to search and find it in the “startup settings” (though you may still ALSO duplicate the checkbox there). Still keeping it unchecked by default remains a valid choice (as I said, there may still be cases when you do NOT want this to be active) as long as it is easy to activate without searching for it.

- What is the “commands console” (which apparently can be only run before connecting)? From the errors by typing random stuff in it makes me think it enables to test javascript functions or something like that? I do hope this is only a feature for the development version of OneTeam. It can be also interesting as a plugin for developpers, but I really don’t think this has anything to do for the finale product (though I am ready to be proven wrong).

- The XML console is an extraordinary nice tool which you can find in all the best (which does not mean they are good, just the best :/) current XMPP clients. And the same as for all these others, I think this is a mistake to add such a feature. This has nothing to do in a finale product as far as I am concerned. In the development version, yes. An optional compilation option (deactivated by default, and to be unadviced in the package repository of a distribution!) so that someone can activate it for him, yes. As a plugin, even an official plugin advised for any XMPP developpers, double yes. As a default option… really bad idea. It will just dazzle users. (as for the “commands console”).

- If I click “join group chatroom” for the first time, I get an highligting orange box telling me “Room name cannot be empty [...]”. I would suggest not to start a new window with an error message showed up “by default” (as obviously there will no room name at first). Show the error message when the user ACTUALLY try to join a room without typing down a room name, not before one even do anything at all. ;)

- If you try to join a room and it does not work (in my case, I made a mistake on the server subdomain so the server was not answering to my presence for the chatroom), it looks like it waits forever. I guess you should check all use cases, and add a timeout (other case for instance when the server is bugged and does not answer at all here). Maybe an “abort” button can be worth it to stop before the timeout too.

- The “show service discovery” feature is a whole topic on its own. As it is right now in OneTeam, like it is in any client I have every tried, it is useless (I mean for the common users, but as far as I understood, this is ProcessOne’s target, the common enterprise user at least, not some XMPP developer. And even for us, XMPP dev, this is not very usable. For instance, I tried to copy/paste a namespace, the text was not even selectable!).

Do you really think for instance that the list of “features” (so a list of protocol namespaces) has any meaning or interest for a normal user?

And the service’s identity (category and type), do you think the user really cares to have this in its purely bare form? No what is awaited from the client is that IT uses this information and provides the user a relevant display, according to the kind of service is proposed (so the XMPP client cares about the identity naming, which is standardized in an XSF registry, but the user only cares about what the client will propose knowing this naming).
Let me remind you this section of XEP-0030:
« This information helps requesting entities to determine the group or “bucket” of services into which the entity is most appropriately placed (e.g., perhaps the entity is shown in a GUI with an appropriate icon). »
Though here it just writes about “icon”, which is maybe why developers around the world does not go further than this (hum. maybe I could see if we cannot improve this sentence in the XEP indeed)… but to make it good, let’s really see what it means here. Go over the word. This feature is NOT AT ALL about a “service discovery”. You should barely even have such words in your client in fact.This is about cleverly providing exciting features to the user, no matter how you got them (and this is not about providing him a feature to read strange words about an url, which he will barely ever type himself anyway).

Etc. Anyway so much to say about service disco and how to finally make this wonderful (right now this is this so badly exploited in any implementation). I would need a conference room to share my mind (and get ideas from yours!), not a forum post.

Anyway this is all for today. Though OneTeam does not provide much more for now, though I should still test the voice call (never had it worked perfectly with other clients, though sometimes intermittently with Pidgin or Empathy) and file transfer (is it the Jingle method for file transfer?).
Bye.

P.S.: I think I may look like I am in some bad mood or that I hate your work or anything. Just don’t think that. It is simply hard to tell things sincerily without seeming mean through the web, or through writing in general. And I hope you don’t expect people to try OneTeam out just to tell it is wonderful (which it is not for now honestly. Not bad, but nothing special).