Better indication of posting failures, and automatic posting failure recovery

[Sandy Armstrong]

When posting a notice fails for whatever reason, the user should know, and with minimal (preferably zero) effort, Gwibber should recover the failed notice and continue trying to post it.

The situation right now:

0. Come up with something remarkably clever to say to all your followers.
1. Enter your incredible tweet in Gwibber's entry field
2. Press "Enter" key to send your tweet.

Expected results:

Entry field clears, tweet gets sent, tweet appears in message list.

Actual results (in the case of an error):

Entry field clears...no indication that anything went wrong. When message doesn't show up, user either assumes it will come later, or thinks message downloading has broken and Gwibber needs to be restarted.

Additional notes:
* indicator in status bar is not sufficient unless you force it to show even for users who have it hidden (me)
* it should be possible to view/edit/cancel pending messages
* when quitting Gwibber, user should be warned if there are pending messages

[Jorge Castro (jorge)]

Maybe an "outbox" in the tree view similar to mail clients. (Ugh, I just went there)

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Jorge O. Castro <email address hidden> wrote:
> Maybe an "outbox" in the tree view similar to mail clients. (Ugh, I just
> went there)

I don't think it's a bad idea, if it only shows up when non-empty.
Since I have the tree disabled, I would hope for an additional
indicator, just to be clear.

One idea: A small message that shows up at the top of whatever stream
(is that the right word?) you're viewing. It would look vaguely like
a message bubble, but would stand out a bit more, announce how many
pending messages you have, and maybe the last time it tried to post
them. It would include a link to the outbox stream (from which you
could edit or cancel the pending messages) and perhaps a link to the
error stream.

This would be easy to do thanks to the magic of webkit, and would
ensure that the user was aware of the issue (the top of the current
stream is the first place they look).

This might be an interesting way to deliver other messages "from
Gwibber", though nothing specific comes to mind.

Another feature (I should file a bug for this) that might help would
be the ability to collapse messages to small lines. For the "pending
messages" message, some users might want to collapse it after they
read it once, but having it remain there but smaller would still be a
good indicator that messages are pending. For other messages, it
might just be nice to collapse them if they are big or irritating in
some way.