On Mon, May 06, 2013 at 09:23:54AM -0700, Moses Lei wrote: > On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Robert Vehse <robertve...@fastmail.fm>wrote: > > > > > Menu bar item > > - active input: maybe a bit too geeky for the average user > > > I disagree. iCal has this and it's mostly self explanatory, you type in > some text like "lunch with Alana on Friday 8pm" and it parses it and > creates your event. Natural language parsing has a lot of uses (for example > this could be extended to cover voice when Siri comes to the Mac), and is > often faster than hunting for a menu item or a particular contact among > hundreds.
I agree with Robert that 90% of the users will probably not understand the "active input" field. iCal has a relatively easy job in this regard, as it has only one different action: creating an event. Of course there is extra data, like the time, date and place, but not much else. The proposal already mentions a number of different actions that can be entered into the field: starting group chats, adding contacts, sending messages, etc. When you start to add every way somebody could try to express "start a group chat with John and Steve" in all ~27 languages Adium supports, you're looking at a massive amount of work. Now for my general input on the proposal. I'm going to write this with the assumption that the message view stays theme-able, preferably in a backwards-compatible way. * Message pinning: technically already possible from a message style (with some JS), but that wouldn't persist. * Message settings: what does this mean? * Inline images and video: already possible, there are plugins for this (only for load URLs, not file transfers). Given the security risks, I'm not sure something like this should be included by default. * Dropbox-integration: I dislike Dropbox, but don't let that stop anyone else from adding it. * The toolbar: Adium's toolbar is pretty dated and crowded (at least by default). Most other OS X applications are now using toolbars with only rectangular, gray buttons with a black image. Between that and this, I think this proposal fits Adium better. * The tab bar: I quite like the proposal. Seeing the latest message on the tab sounds like a nice addition. I have some doubts about how this would scale with many group chats, though. Although I kept calling them "tabs", the area there actually looks more like the contact list. With the current customizability of the contact list (barring missing features like the message read indicator and latest message), it is already possible to obtain a list pretty similar to this. From the comments on this proposal on other sites, I've noticed two different groups of people: those who prefer Adium to stay compact and out of the way and those who would like a single-window layout for Adium. So what I was thinking about is replacing the tab bar with a view that is basically the same view as the contact list. There should be an option to make it show the full contact list, basically making Adium single-window. It should also be possible to keep the separate-window contact list around, then this view will only show the currently open chats. This will also make the "tab bar" scrollable (I quite dislike the current tab overflow menu). Possible problems with this include: * Dragging a tab by its handle now creates a new window. Dragging contacts moves them between groups. * The tab bar on the bottom and the top make no sense anymore (did top ever make sense? :P ) That's all I have for now. Thijs
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