Hi folks, With a beta of 1.6 on the horizon, I'd like to talk about some of Adium defaults. About a year ago Rick Fillion of Black Pixel (Kaleidoscope, Versions, NetNewsWire) went to the trouble of giving us detailed feedback via email on why he is unhappy with Adium's defaults and Peter Hosey forwarded the email to us for consideration: http://markmail.org/message/m3f777mmqu66tqaa?q=default+list:im.adium.devel#query:default list:im.adium.devel+page:1+mid:m3f777mmqu66tqaa+state:results. Nothing came of it back then but I think now is a good time to make substantial improvements that don't necessarily mean a lot of work.
> I just want to start by saying that I really truly do like Adium. It's a > good app, and I use it heavily every day. > I get a lot of people asking me what the best way to get MSN or AIM on a Mac. > The answer for this is very clear in my mind: Adium. And so that's what I > recommend. Basically everyone I recommend it to goes and tries it out. But > very very few end up sticking with it. Why? Cause the default install turns > just about everyone off except those of us who know that we can go and tweak > it to turn down the suck. Rick's critique touches very different aspects of Adium's defaults but one particularly struck a nerve with me: default notifications. Default notifications > - Sounds. It's tacky. Unless my Mac has something VERY important to tell > me, it better not make a peep. Certainly not every time I get a message. I > turn that off immediately. All sounds. > - Growl Messages. Treat it like sound, only a smidge less severe. It's not > cute, it's not flashy, it's annoying. A growl alert takes my focus away from > whatever I was doing (usually something significantly more important than > IM). Tell me something important, something that warrants my attention. > Think _hard_ about that one […] I really can relate to that criticism. From what I've gathered over the years, many users are unhappy with the high amount of default notifications (two examples from the last two days: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/331848672918769665, https://twitter.com/kaelifa/status/332123768749178881). As far as I can tell, even most of us on the Team turn off many of the default notifications. The number one reason for this default setup I've been given is "discoverability", that is pushing all options in the user's face so that they know about them. However, as Rick mentions above, only those who bother and are somewhat technically inclined will go and check out the events settings to make changes, many will just move on to the next piece of software if they are too pissed off. So in my opinion, we should choose "sane defaults", defaults that make sense. People shouldn't be forced to figure out our events preferences to make Adium fun to use. If people add more notifications or use a different type of notification, they can still go and discover the possibilities. Toolbar items > This is really just scratching the surface. Rick Fillion didn't specifically comment on our current selection of default toolbar items in the chat window but I've seen it being criticised many times as well (Paul Wilde last brought this up: https://trac.adium.im/ticket/15400). The toolbar is definitely too crowded and crammed with some rarely-used functions. Arguably, only frequently-used functions should be given this much permanent space in the UI. Let's review these two areas of defaults, notifications and toolbar items, for Adium 1.6. I've set up pages on our Wiki for discussion: https://trac.adium.im/wiki/DefaultsReview2013. Cheers, Robbie
