#3 Limit view to a single conversation

[Brad Griffith]

Not sure what the ideal UI would be for this, but I
think it would be useful to let the user limit the view
to a single conversation. An example way of handling
this would be when the user right-clicks on an
individual message (this may require switching to
something like gtkmozembed instead of the gtk textview)
they can choose "View Conversation." Then, maybe in a
new window, we could display only messages that match
the two users from that single message.

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This is a good idea, and has been frequently suggested to me
in many different forms, but I think it would be a bit hard
to impliment. AIM and MSN do not give the souce buddy name
on outgoing messages, only the recipient buddy name. So one
would have to reconstruct the conversations by ip; however,
while the source ip for the message is going to be the
senders local network ip, the destination ip won't be the ip
of the recipient; rather it will be the ip of the
intermediary protocol server! You follow me? If we are to
filter conversations, the best approach we can hope for is
to filter messages to and from a given ip; while this is not
exactly filtering by conversation, it's close enough. Would
that fit closely enough into the single conversation
paradigm you were thinking of, or would it just confuse the
user?

A different consideration: is this a necessary and useful
feature? How busy should we expect the network to be; in
other words, how much IM traffic should the interface be
designed to handle efficiently? On the one hand, we could
take a design approach that would allow this tool to be used
to monitor... say 10-30 conversations at once, easily. The
GUI that would result would probably be much harder to
understand and use (not to mention program and design!) than
if we target 2 conversations at once, for example.

Any thoughts, suggestions, or comments?

[Justin G. Zaun]

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Some Thoughts prefaced with my situation (NOTE I HAVE NOT
USED THIS SOFTWARE YET):

I'm a student at a school on a wireless network (you know
the type of person using the sniffer in a way that is
questionable). Put my wireless card in permiscuious mode and
wala lots and lots of IM traffic.

I would recommend one window for each protocol, each window
opening a new tab for each IP (if to/from isn't known) or
conversation. This would allow someone to quickly know whats
going on and to "monitor" traffic for "interesting" topics.

Just a thought for a high use area.