Gaim and UI

So I’ve been using Gaim’s 2.0 CVS (devel­op­ment ver­sion). They have some nice changes since 1.5.0. The most notable upon sign­ing in (espe­cially some­one like me who has an AIM, a Jab­ber, and two IRC accounts) is the absence of the account sign-on win­dow. It is one of the most annoy­ing fea­tures about 1.X (and I have read that many peo­ple would agree), espe­cially on my net­work con­nec­tion which some­times seems to be flaky. (I used to get a win­dow pop­ping up every time an account would disconnect.)

Another nice thing is the sta­tus mes­sage “selec­tor”. Whereas you used to have to use the menubar or sys­tem tray menu to set an away mes­sage, now you can set your sta­tus in the main win­dow by way of a menu bar at the bot­tom (see the screen­shot). It’s very nice; you can select from a few dif­fer­ent types of sta­tuses (though I hon­estly don’t know if all of them apply to the dif­fer­ent protocols).

And the lit­tle things are nice too:
1. There’s now a key­board short­cut to open the for­mat­ting bar (I nor­mally keep it off but want it on at a key­stroke).
2. The tooltips in the buddy list are a lit­tle better-looking now, though I’d have a hard time describ­ing how.
3. The Buddy List can be made smaller now with­out seem­ing cramped.
4. New mes­sages don’t just appear at the bot­tom; the rest of the text “slides” upward to make room for the new mes­sage. Not only does it look slick, but it’s more eye-catching.

A few peeves, though all may be gone by 2.0:
1. The absence of the con­nec­tion win­dow is not (yet) replaced with any kind of noti­fi­ca­tion, so it’s hard to know at a glance if a con­nec­tion has been dropped.
2. The idle times of bud­dies can­not be turned off (the option is gone), so when I make the Buddy List smaller, I still end up with things cut off. (I trust that this will option be added back in before 2.0.)
3. IRC/chat han­dling is still less pol­ished. I’m of the mind that Gaim should remem­ber win­dow posi­tion, but even bar­ring that, you can’t keep the user list off in chat win­dows and they always open at the same (big) size. I filed some bugs in Gaim’s bug­tracker a while ago (and I know they’re focus­ing on lower-level code changes first) but I hope that they get to them before 2.0 is released. (I’d patch the UI code myself if I knew C.)

All told, some nice changes in Gaim already. I still rec­om­mend it to any­one as the IM client of choice; it’s only short of Tril­lian’s* func­tion­al­ity (and only in a few less-than-critical ways), it sup­ports all your accounts at once, it’s com­pletely free, and it just plain rocks.

*- Plus, Tril­lian is not avail­able for Linux and costs money to get all the fea­tures. ($25 for an IM pro­gram?!)