Overall, I like the direction you've taken with the UI. I'm not a huge fan of Messages, which it seems you've gone to a certain extent emulating, but the simplicity definitely does appeal to me. I especially like the removal of a lot of the icon clutter, one of my few annoyances with Adium. However, the menubar contacts are a bit iffy for me; I very, very rarely use the menubar for anything more than display. The only app I use regularly resident in it, Mint Quickview, is hardly a favorite of mine for that exact reason. Perhaps as an option, for those who choose to use it, but I definitely prefer a regular, dedicated window.
Moreover, the sidebar with current conversations is nice, but I think it could be curious to go the route of Google Talk: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z5w4yczdz9h21v0/2013-05-03-04.30.48.png Rather than a separate list of conversations, it could integrate the buddy list and conversations, by moving up and differentiating contacts who are currently engaged in conversations with you. This works well and saves space. The active input is especially curious, and I wonder how useful it'll be. I often use a lot of keyboard-driven interfaces (I use Spotlight to launch just about everything), but I've never really thought about it for my instant messenger. I figure if it's done well, though, I'd use the hell out of it. Overall, I really do like the more simple and clean direction you took. The entire chat 'bubble' style isn't exactly my favorite, so I figure it'd be nice (and likely not incredibly hard) to retain the traditional configurability of the chat view. Currently, I've got it with something clean and simple like so: http://cl.ly/image/1o1u3q2l0c41 Nothing incredibly fancy, but just a preference. I've never been a fan of bubbles. Overall, though, I love the direction. If this ever does come together into something, I'd love to give it a shot. On May 2, 2013, at 3:07 PM, Oskar Krawczyk <oskar.krawc...@gmail.com<mailto:oskar.krawc...@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Folks, Just a quick introduction, my name's Oskar, I'm a UI/UX designer/developer. Some of you might already know me by the quick... "chat" I had with Colin over twitter, yesterday :-) You're all probably busy people so I'll get the the point. In February, I tweeted about how the messenger market for mac is lacking, mentioning Adium in the process. Robert Vehse replied saying that if I have a suggestion I should create something, so I teamed up with a great UI designer and friend of mine (Dawid), and started working on a completely rethought frontend for Adium. There were a few private mails between Robert and me just in order to have a more presentable version of our proposal, but the word got out (on Hacker News), so we need to present what we've came up with now. The initial blog post about the Adium Case Study http://nouincolor.com/blog/adium-reborn/ (click on the screen for a full presentation - click to change the slide). Most of the screens from the presentation are self-explanatory. One thing that might need some introduction is the Active Input, this is basically something like Fantastical has – an intelligent input that figures out the stuff you’re trying to do, like: * chat Robert * chat Robert and Luke * message Robert * yesterdays chat with Robert * Robert history from yesterday * status away * add oskar.krawc...@gmail.com<mailto:oskar.krawc...@gmail.com> to Friends * … As I've mentioned before, this UI is not as polished as I'd like it to be. Plus, if you guys would be interested in this proposal, Dawid and myself, we'd spend more time in refining and getting all of the screens ready. I've been using Adium for years (remember this<http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=3655> or this<http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=6218>), as much as I like it, I'd love if this project could take a bolder move, and adopt a minimalistic UI as we've created - this could potentially open the doors to a completely new user-base. If you folks are not planning on taking Adium in a slightly different direction, no hard feelings, we've tried, and we're happy :-) Best Regards, Oskar
