[Psi-devel] Privacy

[Jeroen Vaes]

On Friday 22 April 2005 18:08, Remko Troncon wrote:
> http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~remko/psi/forums/privacy.png

I think the "problem" with all of these dialogs is that the base configuration 
stays too difficult for the average user. Only advanced users will understand 
how to create a list of privacy options to fit their need, and for them it's 
quite powerful, but a regular user doesn't want to think hard when he just 
wants to block someone. Chances are he won't even understand the concept of a 
"list".

Therefore, I think Psi should have an easy GUI that masks the lists from the 
user. The "hard work" of thinking out a privacy list should be done by the 
software, not by the user.

Anyway, this is my attempt. It is based on what I remember from Miranda's 
privacy settings (which was mentioned earlier in this thread I beleive):
<http://users.telenet.be/jvaes/psi/psi-privacy.png>

To block a certain event, the user just clicks in te collumn next to the 
contact of his choice, and a little icon appears. When an icon is present, it 
means the event is blocked. when it it not, the event is allowed.

Clicking on an event on a group automatically makes the icons appear for all 
contacts in that group, which makes it easy to define exceptions to that rule 
(e.g. I want to block messages from everyone in General except Contact 2 
woiuld require 2 clicks: one in the M-column next to General to turn all 
icons on and one in the M-column next to Contact 2 to turn that one off).

You can still define "lists" or "presets" with this dialog. The default list 
should be in bold (this is not in the screenshot as I didn't know how to make 
1 item bold in Qt Designer), the "make default" button makes the current list 
the default one.

You can't set the current list here, but I don't think this dialog is the 
place to do so. That should be in the Psi-menu of the main window, or with a 
combobox on the toolbar or something. A users should only need this dialog to 
edit their privacy list, not for anything else.

I think a dialog like this is much more user-friendly as Psi does the hard 
work for you, yet still is powerful enough.

Then again, I'm not a usability expert and this is only the second time I've 
posted to this list, so maybe my opinion doesn't matter all that much. But 
hey, at least I tried :-)

-- 
Jeroen Vaes
Mail: jeroen.vaes at telenet.be
Jabber: jeroenv at amessage.de