My concern is 2 fold: 1) If you are just blindly removing preferences while instead not trying to make Adium smarter about how it handles things, then that's not very beneficial. My favorite example is as follows:
The is a way in Adium preferences so that tabs will be grouped together in windows by the groups in the contact list. If Adium instead detected in the background that users were grouping by the groups in the contact list, then it could silently start performing this behavior. If a user then starts pulling tabs out differently, disable the behavior. 2) You have no statistics as to what users enable/disable/fiddle with. This is all based on opinions/conjecture. There is already infrastructure in place that would help to collect at least some of this sort of information. My problem here is that if only .001 percent of adium users configure more than just new xtras to use and accounts, then this seems like a lot of work for very little gain to me. Chris On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Patrick Steinhardt <steinhard...@me.com>wrote: > Hey guys, > > It has often been found that Adium's UI is overwhelming and potentially > confusing. Recently, we discussed a reduction of preferences and menu items > in #adium-devl and set up a Wiki page to allow for a wider discussion: > http://trac.adium.im/wiki/PreferenceReduction2011. > > > - File -> Page Setup > This menu item includes needles clutter as the same feature can be accessed > by the "Print"-item. One click on "Details" uncovers the page setup there. > > - File -> Import Fire Accounts and Logs > This messenger has not been actively developed for five years now. To quote > Evan: "Anyone still using Fire at this point is unlikely to ever switch." > > - General Preferences -> Send messages with > Most users (including some of the devs) won't be able to even distinguish > Enter and Return thus rendering this option useless. Current Apple keyboards > often don't even have a return key. Users are still able to enter line > breaks using Alt+Enter keys. > > - Advanced Preferences -> Messages -> Time stamp format > The format can be customized in System Preferences.app. Apparently, some > message styles do not even respect this setting anyway so this setting has > potential for confusion. > > - Advanced Preferences -> Confirmations > We want to replace the entire pane with a checkbox-setup: every warning > that pops up will have a checkbox "Don't show again". To restore all > warnings, there will be a new button "Reset all warnings" which will result > in warnings popping up again. > > > Please voice your concerns about these removals. > > Regards, > Patrick > >
