Redesign: room directory
The current room directory layout is a bit of a mess UX-wise. When you open it, you're greeted by a big empty view with a search bar:
We should make this more immediately useful by showing some popular rooms, like Riot does. Since our app is primarily targeted towards GNOME developers we could do something similar to GNOME Builder's featured newcomer apps, and feature some of the most important GNOME rooms at the top (That would probably include #gnome-hackers, #gnome-design, #gnome-newcomers, and #gnome-engagement). We could also periodically feature different rooms (e.g. 3 different GNOME apps every month), to give them some exposure.
This will obviously need some more thought and discussion (How many rooms do we include? How do we sort them? When do we change them? Algorithmic vs. manually curated? etc.)
The layout is also a bit unelegant, and doesn't scale well to large sizes because there is no maximum column width:
Finally, it's not possible to view rooms from arbitray homeservers that are not on the list.
I propose changing the view layout to this in order to address these issues:
Development Tasks
-
add featured rooms when there is no search term -
move search to the headerbar -
implement new room chooser popover -
implement showing/searching rooms from arbitrary homeserver -
implement new room list layout -
implement maximum column width (using libhandy's HdyColumn)
QA Tasks
-
header bar layout looks as expected -
room list layout looks as expected -
header bar layout looks as expected -
room chooser popover looks as expected -
it's possible to view/search rooms from arbitrary homeservers -
favorites work as expected