[Users] [Bug 3119] add plugin to display QR-Code for avatar

[noreply at thewildbeast.co.uk]

http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3119

--- Comment #5 from Ricardo Mones <mones at users.sourceforge.net> ---
(In reply to comment #4)
> For me there are at least two use cases:
> 
> * Get a unique icon for every sender, just like libravatar's fallback to
> identicon, retro or whatever. QR-Codes are just black and white, but you
> will recognize some pixel combinations just easily.

  Well, there's an important difference, libravatar fallbacks are, with more or
less degree of success, designed to be distinguishable by humans, where QRs are
designed to be parseable by software.

  It's easy to tell if two QRs are different when seen together, but I doubt a
user can keep all that noise in your memory to the point to being able to
recognise addresses. (Un)fortunately human brain evolved to recognise faces,
not black and white dot patterns.

  Yes, some can be recognised, but for most of people I think that's just
visual noise.

> * Scan with your phone: Add the person to your phone's address book or send
> a mail (if for any reason claws-mail can display the message but sending is
> not possible).

  I thought it won't because of blur, and it took a while, but this worked! :)

> (* Currently claws-mail does not print the avatar. If it does you could
> easily answer a mail printed to paper.)

  So not a real use case.

> And possible more. :D

  I'm afraid you're being too optimistic here ;)

> Other than that it is just a nice example for what is possible with the
> avatar API. And it would not hurt anybody, just not loading (or even
> compiling) the plugin brings no extra cost.

  Right, no problem as example, but releasing it always has an extra cost:
maintenance :)

  Thinking again about this, I believe that would be better to try to
incorporate this as another fallback option to libravatar.org server itself.

  That way libravatar plugin can support it easily, and everybody else could be
enjoying the hackish QR avatars in their pages (or other mailers). Don't you
think?

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