Tool bar

The iconic tool bar contains shortcut buttons for some common actions. The six buttons corresponding to the left-to-right button sequence shown immediately below:

Figure 8. BuddySpace tool bar: (a) full view
(b) compact view
  • The 'Connect/disconnect' toggle button provides a quick connection, and changes its label to 'Disconnect' to allow you to disconnect from the server.
  • The 'Show only online' toggle button allows you to indicate the presence of only those users in your roster who are actually logged in at the moment, rather than displaying the entire list, or alternatively toggle to show everyone in your roster, whether they are online or not.
  • The 'Expand/contract all groups' toggle button (red/green triangle) allows you to expand or contract all roster groups in one quick action.
  • The 'Add Contact' (green 'plus') button allows you to add a fresh contact to your roster. When you press this button, you must enter a full Jabber ID (JID) in the syntax explained at the very end of the 'Launch and login' section, e.g. jtw9012@jabber.open.ac.uk.
  • The drop-down menu (set to 'Online' by default) allows you to set your 'Presence' state to any of the settings also provided on the top Presence menu: online, free to chat, online but 'low attention, busy', 'online but physically elsewhere' (e.g. travelling with laptop), away, extended away, do not disturb, custom, or offline.
  • The 'Full view/compact view' toggle button (fat and thin blue rectangles) shows the current viewing state, and allows you quickly to switch to the opposite one. In the compact view, for experienced users, all menus are collapsed under the super-menu called simply Menu, and the presence states are shown only as icons with no text label. The compact view is of most use when all chat and other windows are floated off separately, because this gives you the most streamlined view. Note that the width of each view is determined by the width of the full sets of buttons and menus in any embedded windows. Thus, if your compact view includes only the main window with the single menu item Menu, it will be extremely thin, but if it also includes docked (un-floated) windows such as groupchat, then it will consequently be somewhat wider