[Gossip-dev] Two not relevant suggestions (little wish list)

[Mikael Hallendal]

Kaloian Doganov wrote:

> Hello!

Hi,

> I do not want to struggle with you. Currently, Gossip is such a sweet
> little app that I just love. Guys, thanks for making it!
> 
> I'm just afraid that adding more IM protocols will overweight the user
> interface. IM protocols have a lot of common ideas, but also have
> differences. (For example, what if I invite an ICQ buddy to a Jabber
> group chat room?) Which may lead to (well, functional) app that does not
> run as smooth as now. I'm just afraid that in the future I will lose my
> sweet app that has wonderful simple and clean interface.

We are planning on making the UI as simple as possible. For example if 
you don't have any other IM systems than Jabber you won't be asked which 
account you want to add a new contact to.

Your example above is somewhat true but on the other hand, if you need 
to use ICQ you wouldn't be able to use Gossip at all otherwise. Also, 
this is likewise true for ICQ-contacts running through a transport...

Why would we ruin the UI because of this, we wouldn't add it if we don'e 
beleive we can do it without breaking the current design. The main focus 
of Gossip hasn't changed...

> I'm just afraid that Gossip developers will start losing their time in tasks 
 > such as fixing the Yahoo! protocol implementation to reflect the most 
recent
> changes made by Yahoo! Incompatibility Team.

I don't plan to spend time on this. My plan is to write a wrapper around 
Gaim plugins and use them. If this is not possible I won't spend my time 
adding support for Yahoo!

> This is just an example, I do not have anything against Yahoo!, although
> I still think that if Yahoo! folks do not want to be supported, we must
> not support them. ;-)

What the Yahoo! (team) folks thinks is totally uninteresting here. What 
the users wants is very different from what the people running the 
Yahoo! service is.

> On the other side, I see that the lack of plain ICQ, MSN and Yahoo!
> support will eventually limit the wider acceptance of Gossip and the
> "official IM" of GNOME will be Gaim. :-/

There are three reasons for why I want to add support for client side 
protocols in Gossip:

1) People use it and imho transports doesn't do the job for the majority
    of the users. Though for some people with enough technical
    skills/resources can run their own reliable servers. I want to use it
    myself since I don't think transports do it for me.

2) It will only add functionality without ruining any user experience.
    The functionality is very asked for and with transport support we
    will have a slightly more complex UI anyway, so, that UI will already
    be there when we add transports.

3) Wider acceptance as the preferred GNOME IM application. Since it's
    pretty clear that GNOME as a community isn't likely to do the right
    thing here (imho) and promote a free and open protocol I'm afraid
    that Gaim is going to be the de facto standard IM application even
    though I really don't feel it's very GNOMEie.

Anyway, *PLEASE* don't count on us to destroy the user experiance before 
you've seen what we plan to do. It's still the same people developing 
Gossip and we still have the same goals with Gossip.

Best Regards,
   Mikael Hallendal

-- 
Imendio AB, http://www.imendio.com/
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