Textual Chat / IM
Mockups
Banner times out and hide when the user is interacting with the computer. If idle, the banner will stay up. See comment 8, bug #643014
Mute is a toggle button that you can use to avoid getting banner from a particular person. It's like setting your status to busy, but only wrt a particular person. His messages will go straight to the message tray. The status gets reset when you've explicitly untoggled the button in the message tray or read the backlog and the conversation cleared out automatically (see below).
When a new message comes in while interacting with the expanded box, it shows up peeking below the expanded overlay.
Active conversations can be accessed going to the messsage tray. Clicking the avatar image brings up the coversation overlay. Clicking the X button on the overlay will dismiss it like everything else. Conversation will still remain in the message tray.
Closing a conversation and freeing up the message tray can be done with a long press context menu. Conversations with no unseen posts will time out and clear out from the message tray. This can be prevented by enabling the 'Keep conversation open' switch.
When the pointer is at the bottom of the screen, banners don't appear over the cursor, but avoid it, trying to peek out. To make them appear fully expanded, the user has to first move out and then back in.
Discussion
There is a discussion of what to do after the message tray is dismissed in bugzilla #641723
- missed a message - never expire a banner when user idle
allow to mute conversations - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659962
expire inactive conversations from the message tray - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=663199
status/timestamp https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669508