Idea: To make the contact finding quicker [Empathy]
The problem
Usually the contact finding in Empathy is a little tricky. Basically you can look at a contact just by to ways: Looking through the whole contact list or use Ctrl+F and "search" typing a prefix of the nickname. The first way is obvious not so good when the list is very large, the second one doesnt throw successful results all the time.
The proposal
My possible solution is based on the idea that: Usually i just chat with a few contacts, not with the whole contact list, so... why don't we make the access to this contacts easier? The next question is: Who are those contacts? I came up with 2 answers: Frequent and Related Contacts. Frequent contacts? it explains by itself. Related contacts are those who are related with the activities you are doing at the workspace Empathy window is. This work could be done by Zeitgeist.
And... what about with the big list of not so frequent or not related to what you are doing? You can find them through a search bar (implemented as a live search) which shows the results of the search while typing.
I made a mockup of how it could be shown without a big change on the current Empathy "Contact List" window design.
Notes
I think that this possible feature should be optional.