When the user drags the chat plasmoid in a panel he expects to see something, but instead there is just the empty space for 2 chat buttons. This is confusing for the user. I suggest to display a semi-transparent telepathy-kde icon as a placeholder when no chats are open (perhaps it could have a menu to start a chat with someone in the plasmoid since at the moment there seem to be no way to do so)
Maybe it would be a good idea to have a list of contacts the user can add there to start a chat? Does telepathy have the concept of "favorite" friend? Or is that mean? :P
I was originally going to make it possible to 'pin' contacts to the plasmoid. And I probably still will when I get around to giving it activities support. As for the original point about it being confusing, isn't this behaviour pretty much what the 'Task Manager' applet does?
Maybe zeitgeist could help here to have the list of "most chatted-with friends". Or some simple logger heuristics. The semi-transparent icon drdanz is suggesting could also work. Or maybe semi-transparent label "No active chats"? I'm personally for empty plasmoid so it does not clutter my panel btw.
*** Bug 304468 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Another option could be hiding (collapsing) the empty space while there is nothing there. It'll reduce cluttering.
I think it's fine to have it empty. It's misleading from the Plasma UI point of view, but I also don't like to add stuff only to make it nice when in Plasma editing mode. Maybe it's possible to know if we're editing from plasma? we could change state in this case...
*** Bug 346394 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I'd like to get this fixed properly for plasma5 now. Ideally it should behave in the same way as desktop pager does - no data to show, collapse.
Git commit 2a05e6efd280fcb3c902a82a1a16b3e71530fdb0 by Kai Uwe Broulik. Committed on 31/01/2016 at 14:28. Pushed by broulik into branch 'master'. [Quick Chat] Use HiddenStatus when no chats are present This causes the applet to completely disappear in the panel. When entering panel edit mode the applet shows up so it can be configured/removed easily. REVIEW: 126929 M +1 -1 chat/org.kde.ktp-chat/contents/ui/FullChatList.qml http://commits.kde.org/telepathy-contact-applet/2a05e6efd280fcb3c902a82a1a16b3e71530fdb0