If a protocol has the concept of presence, showing when users are
online or available, then its Connection
will provide the SimplePresence interface.
This interface provides functions to set and get the user's current
presence as well as the presence of other accounts (usually the accounts
on the user's roster).
Setting the user's own presence is documented in
Section 5.3 ― Presence.
Presence vs. SimplePresence
The Telepathy API specification also specifies another presence interface
Presence. This interface was deemed too
complex and has summarily been deprecated. Telepathy clients should
not use Presence and instead use
SimplePresence.
Many of the common requests that are made when a Telepathy client
starts up (e.g. aliases, avatars, presence) can be batched together
in a call to Contacts.GetContactAttributes.
See Section 7.1 ― Contacts for more information.
The presence for a list of contact handles can be retrieved with the
GetPresences method call. This method call
takes an array of handles of type Handle_Type_Contact
and returns a map of those handles to Simple_Presence
structs.
Presence updates can be tracked by connecting the
PresencesChanged signal.
