The Issue
- Currently, tracking yourself in an application is not that user friendly, you have to search for your username.
- Usernames are not unique, there are many Jonathan's for example
- When an application doesn't show the user's avatar it's impossible to choose between them
- Applications designed for mobile or other devices which it is probable that there is low connection speed, so if an application does show avatars it takes a while to download all of them
- An alternative is for the user to just enter their id for a particular site, but this is not streamlined and as simple as logging in.
Alternatively
- Ask the user which site they have an account on.
- Show an integrated web panel/browser giving them the login page of the site they selected.
- Optionally edit the login page using JavaScript to make it fit the application better (eg. size of the apps window)
- After the user has logged in parse the resulting HTML to get the user's id from the link at the top of the page.
- Get the user's Association ID from the "local" (ie. not StackAuth) API
- With the user's association ID get all the account they are linked to from StackAuth.
Downsides to this are:
- Not exactly official, will the user doubt putting their Open ID in
- User never gets asked to click "Allow this app to use my Open ID"
- Not simple as one login place, requires downloading HTML twice for a Stack Exchange site, using the site's API once, and then using the StackAuth. 4 "hits" when they could just be 2 basic ones.