I did a quick mock-up of two possible ways I see the contact wizard fitting into Evince. First, there’s the obvious choice of accessing it through the Files menu. I showed the original design to the docs team over coffee at the Open Help Hackfest, and got some input. Initially, I had named the menu item Share…. Shaun and Phil suggested Meeting… and Phil suggested Start Meeting…. I must agree that Share doesn’t convey the nature of what the program should do, which is to allow for remote control of client instances of Evince via Telepathy tubes. The user should be able to invite participants to a ‘meeting’. If a participant accepts the invitation, an instance of Evince will open up on the remote machine, controlled by the machine that sent the invite.

People who use Evince when doing a live presentation (like I have done), may be more likely to stumble across the new feature when setting up to View their file in Fullscreen or Presentation mode. Jim suggested placing the Share Meeting… menu item in the View menu for the purpose of discoverability.

The contact wizard itself has access to the user’s Empathy contact list. The user will select particants to invite. The mock-up contains one possible design for the wizard. This version allows the user to select contacts by clicking on their name in a list, or by typing the name in the entry box. The entry box is useful for very long contact lists. I don’t think this is the best design. After drawing this design I have come up with other possible designs. Stay tuned…

When designing the wizard, another thing to consider is what to do if the user wants to invite someone who is only an e-mail contact and not in the Empathy contact list. Of course, it is simple enough to quickly add someone to this list, but perhaps may not always be possible. Food for thought.