My team communicates a lot with IM. We'll sometimes use IM to ask a question even to someone who's in the next cube over. The reason for this is that we all find that answering an IM is much less disrupting than talking.
Still, I find that the blinking message window can be disrupting when I'm heads down coding. I can't help but look at what people have written and it often keeps me from finishing my thought. This type of multitasking is a productivity killer. I've therefore turned off the alert feature (I'm using Pidgin). My Windows task bar is hidden so I need to drag my cursor to the bottom of the screen, let the task bar pop up, and look if the pidgin tray icon is flashing orange to find out about new messages.
This works well except that sometimes people have a quick question to ask for which they need a quick answer.
It would be great to have the ability to send priorities on messages:
Priority 3: Check this out when you can
Priority 2: Normal chat
Priority 1: Please reply quickly
The priority level would then be used to determine the alert method. E.g. (1)Give focus to window, (2)blink in task bar, (3)blink in tray.
Any ideas on an easy way of accomplishing this?
Thanks
We use e-mail or internal twitter for your Priority 3.
We use IM for Priority 2.
We use walking over to someone's desk for Priority 1.
Edit: I'm sorry I didn't realize you were asking an implementation question. If you didn't want to institute new policies/standards for methods of contact (ala introducing an internal twitter or the like), you would need to standardize everyone in the office on the same IM application/protocol. And then you'd need to modify one. Trying to add something into the jabber spec (if it doesn't have it, I don't know) would be tedious and not worth the effort.
If you really wanted to pursue that route, you would probably be better off moving to IRC and using scripts to alert you if people talk to you while preceding their message with a pound! or something similar.
I think that as soon as you introduce a "priority message" function, all messages will start to be high priority. Human nature. I just set my status to "busy" and don't reply to messages that come in when i'm "busy" unless it is important. People get the point quickly.
While I agree with the statement that being able to make certain messages a higher priority will result in ALL messages being high-priority, you can always just shut off the IM, and then people will have to actually talk to you. If they are on your team, they should know when you are heads-down, and take some personal responsibility in making the decision to disrupt you.
I do roughly the same thing that Codingscape does - I set my status to Away. Many clients will display an 'away text' message when your status changes, so I just use "I'm very busy" or a similar message.
Related
Periodically, I like to send friendly text messages to large groups of people in my contacts. Sending the same message to lots of people is tedious, but I've never been fully satisfied with solutions offered by existing apps. So, I started developing my own.
I started with a Shortcut that works pretty well and has a few defining characteristics:
Messages can have "tags", such as for swapping in a contact's name, for a more personal touch.
Contacts receive their own personal text message. They are not part of a group message. No publicized phone numbers or delete-me-from-the-group bombs.
I can leave the process alone while it works; I don't have to confirm each message to send.
The whole process is serialized and persisted. If the process halts due to a faulty contact (like a disconnected phone number), I can resume the process right where I left off. No contact gets sent a duplicate message.
Shortcuts are a poor man's programming, though, and I was aching for a proper development experience. So I started learning Swift and writing an app to give me a more robust, UI friendly version of the Shortcut.
Alas, I fear I may have been eager. I haven't been able to find any documentation or examples of sending an iMessage or SMS text message to a contact without the need of some UI. MSMessageAppViewController is not what I want, because that sort of defeats the purpose of my automation goal here.
It seems very odd to me that Shortcuts would allow me to send text messages to a bunch of contacts without needing to confirm each message, and yet I can't do the same in a Swift program. Maybe I'm missing something?
This isn’t really an answer to your issue (I believe you can only use MSMessageViewController to send messages), but I did discover you can disable iMessage and Group Messaging and make it so when you send a message to a large group of people it sends them as individual, direct SMS messages.
I used this to send a text out to a group of 90 people without inciting a mass group thread. It was annoying to setup (and if you don’t set it up properly you’ll end up making a giant group thread which is scary) and you have to remember to undo the changes after, but it worked like a charm!
See this q/a: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5211685?answerId=22908620022#22908620022
I have a contact flow that is using a pre-recorded voice prompt with a lex bot for voice rec. This is the main menu verbiage:
“Thank you for calling. If you would like to use your keypad to select the menu options, say “keypad”, otherwise please listen to the following menu options. For billing questions, say “billing”. To report a missed pickup, say “missed pickup”. If you are a current customer with recycling or other account questions, say “other”. If you are not a current customer, and have questions, say “sales”. To hear the menu again, say “repeat menu”. For all other questions, please remain on the line.”
I have set the error handling in the Lex bot to speak "Sorry, I'm having a hard time understanding you. Let's try using the keypad instead to make sure we route your call properly."
This is working when an utterance is not matched or an invalid option is spoken or pressed. However, I cannot figure out if it's possible to allow the lex bot to timeout like in a normal DTMF contact flow and send the caller to the next step in the menu without playing the error handling in from the Lex bot.
Is this possible?
That's the thing, Lex is not meant to be used this way. It MUST have an input to process, and if it reaches Lex's timeout, then it will always return an error and deliver the error handling response.
So you will have to get fancy in the Connect Flow to catch the Lex error message, and turn it into your own handling of it. But it will be hard to know whether Lex is erroring because it didn't understand, or because the user chose not to respond.
Therefore, I would personally avoid building the bot in a way that allows the user to remain silent. The user must direct Lex every step of the way and have easy ways of backing out of an unwanted action.
Remember that Lex is much more powerful than the old automatic call systems, so trying to force Lex into that old system won't work well. Depending on how you design your bot, you can make the conversation much much more natural, accepting a very wide range of responses and directing those into proper actions.
Tips:
Things may have changed more recently, but when I was building Lex/Connect, it was not possible for the user to interrupt a playback message. So I had to also avoid what you are trying to do in the welcome message:
If you would like to use your keypad to select the menu options, say “keypad”, otherwise please listen...
Naturally, a user who does want to use the keypad will try to immediately say "keypad" and probably get frustrated by having to listen to the rest of the playback message. So I design every playback message to be short, deliver information first, and always end on the question. Often breaking the conversation up into more branching points to make the questions as specific as possible.
Don't worry about going back and forth with the user too many times. It gives the user comfort knowing they are on the right path to what they want and are able to control the conversation in smaller steps. They will get stressed, having to listen to long list of options and remembering what they are while figuring out which one best applies to them.
So make each question as clear as possible and avoid spoonfeeding options. It feels less natural to explicitly state to the user what they should say:
To report a missed pickup, say “missed pickup”.
That is unnatural.
A good middle ground would be asking one question with a list of options and pausing between each option. The user will understand that these are responses they should make, but won't feel unnaturally pressured into exact phrases. For example:
Would you like to, check your billing, report a missed pickup, ask about sales, or something else?
That is natural.
We are comfortable handling those types of questions because we often do that when speaking with humans. You may even want to use a question mark instead of commas so that the playback voice uses a questioning intonation with each option. It looks less natural in written form, but would probably sound more natural.
Last tip: Don't design your bot based on your experience talking with bots. Design your bot based on your experience talking with humans.
I am trying to simulate a buy side client who could send order to an exchange, receive execution reports and further cancel / replace orders. QuickfixJ Banzai swing based UI seems like an ok fit given it’s free and our startup doesn’t want to spend a lot of money for this.
Currently the Benzai UI only has specific text boxes to send orders with fields for symbol, qty etc. I was wondering if someone has come across an extension to this swing UI example which takes messages in a freeform text area so that we are not limited by the number of economic fields exposed in the UI and could send any other fix messages in the text area.
Another tool that comes to my mind is http://fixpusher.sourceforge.net/
AFAICT it is not maintained anymore and probably is capable of more than what you want.
But if you have a little of Java coding experience, how hard can it be to add a text box to Banzai and call MessageUtils.parse() on its contents?
I have a simple Firemonkey application with a series of buttons and sliders (track bar) that when a user interacts with these controls it send a command using IdTelnet. i.e.
IdTelnet1.SendString(' '+str+#13);
The problem is that very occasionally the users experience total lockup of the app and windows reports the app as "Not responding" when clicking on something. I have not reproduced this myself however I suspect its related to clicking on buttons in quick succession.
My current theory is that I am getting re-entry into SendString and IdTelnet is not handling this well.
Before jumping into writing a queued sending system I wanted to ask for any best practice advice. Is this a known issue and what is the best way to do quick fire sends that are user initiated?
I worked my way through the Prism guidance and think I got a grasp of most of their communication vehicles.
Commanding is very straightforward, so it is clear that the DelegateCommand will be used just to connect the View with its Model.
It is somewhat less clear, when it comes to cross Module Communication, specifically when to use EventAggregation over Composite Commands.
The practical effect is the same e.g.
You publish an event -> all subscribers receive notice and execute code in response
You execute a composite command -> all registered commands get executed and with it their attached code
Both work along the lines of "fire and forget", that is they don't care about any responses from their subscribers after firing the event/executing the commands.
I have trouble seeing a practical difference in usage although I understand that the implementation of both (under the hood) is very different.
So should we think of what it actually means - Event? Is that when something happens (an event occurs)? Something the user did not directly request like a "web request completed"?
And Command? Does that mean a user clicked something and thus issued a command to our application, requesting a service directly?
Is that it? Or are there other ways to determine when to use one of these communication vehicles over the other. The guidance, although one of the best documentations I read, gives no specific explanation.
So I hope people involved in/using Prism can help in shedding some light on this.
There are two primary differences between these two.
CanExecute for Commands. A Command
can say whether or not it is valid
for execution by calling
Command.RaiseCanExecuteChanged() and
having its CanExecute delegate
return false. If you consider the
case of a "Save All"
CompositeCommand compositing several
"Save" commands, but one of the
commands saying that it can't
execute, the Save All button will
automatically disable (nice!).
EventAggregator is a Messaging
pattern and Commands are a
Commanding pattern. Although
CompositeCommands are not explicitly
a UI pattern, it is implicitly so
(generally they are hooked up to an
input action, like a Button click).
EventAggregator is not this way -
any part of the application
effectively raise an EventAggregator
event: background processes,
ViewModels, etc. It is a
brokered avenue for messaging
across your application with support
for things like filtering,
background thread execution, etc.
Hope this helps explain the differences. It's more difficult to say when to use each, but generally I use the rule of thumb that if it's user interaction that raises the event, use a command for anything else, use EventAggregator.
Hope this helps.
Additionally, there is one more important difference: With the current implementation, an event from the EventAggregator is asynchronous, while the CompositeCommand is synchronous.
If you want to implement something like "notify that event X happened; do something that relies on the event handlers for event X to have executed", you either have to do something like Application.DoEvents() or use CompositeCommands.