Since I proposed this project initially (and possibly before that, but unknown to me) Alex Larsson has done quite a bit of progress on his very interesting Contacts App. Details can be seen here.
As this application pretty much realizes phase two of my project it seems needless to do all of his work over again, simply to have it embedded in the Shell. Therefore, at least for now, I am focusing my efforts on implementing contacts search and integrating it with his application.
My project was discussed at the recent IM, Contacts & Social hackfest in Cambridge, and people had some good ideas. The wiki page for the hackfest itself can be seen here and the notes from the contacts discussion can be seen here. We'll be going with the rectangular representation of contacts in the search list, giving a somewhat businesscard-like feel to them. It's a way to represent contacts that people intuitively understand, and it looks great as well. Interacting with a "business card" will either show that contact in Alex's application, or show a menu allowing the user to clickly open conversations, view past conversations and so on, depending on how the user interacts with the object.
More to come, so stay tuned.
