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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

New features in production

Typing notification should work for both "librarian" and "patron" when librarian is in Psi or Pidgin. There is some issue with the patron receiving typing notification when the librarian is using Adium; this is on the to-do list.

Real-time presence updates: widget displays status changes (available, away, unavailable) without page refresh.

Librarian receives notification if patron has left the chat. The exact mechanism of the notification depends on the Jabber client in use. Psi provides a text message; Pidgin changes patron status color to grey.

If a patron's chat window is in the background, IE and Safari will flash the chat window when a new librarian message arrives. This will happen often if patron follows a clickable link sent by the librarian. This does not work in Firefox.

For now, Jabber clients will prompt for an authorization request when patrons land on widget web page. If this is annoying, there are several plugins that automatically approve these, like this one that Eric wrote for Pidgin. In Psi, there is a checkbox in the preferences to authorize them automatically; in Adium, in the Options tab of the Edit Account dialog, you'll want the "approve and add" option.

Next up: work on the CSS to make the widget more attractive in IE; create an easy way to do presence (for those that wish to have an online/offline button linking to the widget).

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