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:
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Figure 8. BuddySpace
tool bar: (a) full view
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(b) compact view
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- 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
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