cocoaforge

Will "metacontacts" be avaiable on Adium 0.8?

I'm not really sure if it's called that way, but it's a kinda neat feature I saw on Proteus once... you can "merge" two contacts from different accounts that are actually the same person. Then you can choose, on the message window, the service you wanna use to send the message to that person. But I bet you knew that, right?

Cheers.

It's available now. You can option+drag contacts together, or you can use address book integration. Personally I prefer ab integration for it.

Thanks, Tick...

I didn't notice that... but wouldn't it be neater if you could change the service by just selecting its icon? Pretty much like in Proteus... (not that I prefer Proteus, but I found that interesting)

Cheers.

What does "change its service by selecting its icon" mean?

You know... in Proteus you just have to click on the service icon, inside the message window, and select the one you want to use... the icon is part of the toolbar, like the "insert emoticon" icon, etc...

Victor wrote:You know... in Proteus you just have to click on the service icon, inside the message window, and select the one you want to use... the icon is part of the toolbar, like the "insert emoticon" icon, etc...

If there is a choice, Adium will show a bar on the message window with to/from selectors. The bar won't show up if there's no need for it to be there though (if only one of the contacts in the meta is online).

Yeah, but that is what I was talking about... Adium uses two bars ("to" and "from"), below the toolbar, while Proteus just uses a toolbar icon... in this case, I think Proteus is neater...

I'm not sure if the "from" bar is really needed, also...

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear...

Cheers.

Victor wrote: I'm not sure if the "from" bar is really needed, also...

I have 4 aim accounts. I need it.

The "from" toolbar is necessary if you have multiple screen names on the same service.

heheh... ok, I didn't imagine you guys would need more than one account... sorry...

Do we show from if the user only has one account on that service?

I think so... that's what happens to me, at least... I only have one account per service... but that's probably because you can use AIM to send messages to ICQ and vice-versa, right?

Yeah...AIM and ICQ are sort of the same network now, I think Adium just makes them separate account types to avoid confusion, since many ICQ users don't know that they are on the AIM network, and vice versa.

The_Tick wrote:Do we show from if the user only has one account on that service?

i believe we do, but it's either disabled or has one choice. i don't see taking extra effort to remove it. it behaves exactly as it should, and to have it appear two different ways depending on the number of possible from accounts would just be extra confusion.

Bosk wrote:

The_Tick wrote:Do we show from if the user only has one account on that service?

i believe we do, but it's either disabled or has one choice. i don't see taking extra effort to remove it. it behaves exactly as it should, and to have it appear two different ways depending on the number of possible from accounts would just be extra confusion.

Oh I was just curious.

I think the 'From' bar shouldn't show up if you're only signed on with one account... Plus I don't keep my message windows wide enough to even show the entire 'From' bar, it just gets chopped off, which isn't as pretty.

Ive requested this a long time ago, since in my opinion, the Proteus way is visually better.
And you could have a toolbar dropdown which looked like this:
AIM (Account 1)
AIM (Account 2)
ICQ
MSN (Account 1)
MSN (Account 2)

And so on..

That could get confusing very quickly, especially if both of you have more than one account on the same service.

The_Tick wrote:It's available now. You can option+drag contacts together, or you can use address book integration. Personally I prefer ab integration for it.

But.. if you've joined someone.. and want to split the accounts again??

Get info for that contact (right-click > get info or apple-i), and then select the contact you want to remove in the tray and hit the little "-" (if my memory serves me correctly).

The various ways to do metacontacts have been greatly discussed... this thread seems to have a pretty good list of the ideas. I might add that I find Gaim's method pretty sensible, and intuitive enough that I stumbled upon it without purposefully looking for it.