On Aug 25, 2011, at 17:53:38, Jordan wrote:
> 1. We support a 'classic' mode for Adium that uses borderless styles and the
> separate chat window.
Whereupon nobody would use the new design. A few brave souls, but most would
either stay with what they have (if it's already borderless) or change to
borderless rather than change to single-window.
> 2. Those who are massive fans of borderless mode could fork the code before
> this new UI is introduced and then pick and choose change sets to merge over
> to their fork.
This leads to one of two ends:
- The fork dies shortly thereafter as nobody can be bothered to merge
changesets from Adium while avoiding breakage until the end of time.
- The fork completely separates from Adium. Then it either fluorishes as a
competitor to Adium or dies.
> It seems to be working for Skype …
I don't think I've ever heard somebody like Skype's UI. It brings them a lot of
hatred.
The only way we can avoid that is to make ours better—better than theirs, and
better than our old one.
On that note, taking another quick look at this design, I do have one complaint:
(on the create/join group chat view)
Note that nothing in the sidebar is selected; this emphasizes the fact
that the user hasn’t yet made any permanent *changes*. Selecting an item causes
the user to leave this view discarding any changes, as if they had hit ‘Cancel’.
No. Leave the unfinished group chat in the sidebar, perhaps italicized and with
“(Incomplete)” appended to it. If the user selects that, they return to the
join/create form, preserved as they left it.
Nothing should ever implicitly throw away user data, even uncommitted.
By the way: A lot of this could probably be integrated into the existing
contact list and message windows (especially the message window) without
merging them right away.
So that adds a third option to your list, Jordan:
3. Make single-window another view mode, alternative to “Standard Separate
Contact List Window”, “Borderless Separate Contact List Window”, etc.
If all active Adium developers *really, really want* to preserve existing UI
rather than start fresh, that's the way to go.
