cocoaforge

Kakaze wrote: Anyway, since I got it I've been wondering if when hiding offline contacts, if there is a way to, instead of hiding them completely, put them in a separate group at the bottom of the list and keep them visible just not in in the connected contacts groups.

I understand why you want them visible, so you can message offline contacts, yet I don't understand why would you want them in a separate group?

if you have your contacts in one large group you can sort them out better using View > Sort Contacts and tinker with that. Or another option is to do the Shift+Command+H keyboard shortcut to show/hide your offline contacts.

I don't see the point in having them in a dynamic group. you talk about easy of use, but for me it would be easier (if I had many groups) to always have them in the same spot all the time, online or offline.

SuperJeremy3000 wrote:

tedger wrote:*hears his name pops back onto the forums for the first in a very long time*

yeah help docks are my little thing, right now work is slow, I've got 18 credits and I'm working 15 hours a week. I'm pretty busy. But I still hope on having help pages ready for .8

you are definitely missed here, i used to watch the old forums alot, and you always had good answers to give . just want to say that your missed. But heck, looks like you have very good reason to be gone. good luck with your schooling.

well it's just that I've just not been visiting, I have plenty of time to blow on the forums that I'v been wasting on other stuff. the bookmark has been sitting at cmd+1 in safari taunting me I hang around the irc channel quite a bit now a days but I plan on being a bit more active here. But thanks, I'm glad that some of idle time has gone to helping people.

Instead of having offline users listed separately, I would like an option to "Always show contact", configurable with other per-contact settings.

That way I can hide all offline contacts, except for the people I know who regularly set themselves "invisible" that I'll still want to be able to send a message to.

evands wrote:That said, Smart Groups would be sweet, and certainly would enable this sort of functionality. It would definitely be a monumental amount of effort, and it's not a direction I for one plan to work in the near future.. but if someone else wanted to, give it a shot, it could be cool

I would say that the buddy list using Smart Groups would not allow inline editing; it definitely wouldn't make sense in that context. Therefore, were it done, there could be a View menu toggle to revert to the normal view for editing purposes.

Of course, that could be a UI nightmare for anyone who didn't know exactly what they were doing... and would be quite difficult to explain with succinct menu titles.

I dunno - iTunes has editable Smart Playslits and Regular Playlists at the same time. I can see why the smart group wouldn't be so editable, but I'm not sure that it would necessarily make the entire buddy list uneditable?

That said, offline groups = stupid. Smart groups = good.

jstamos wrote:I dunno - iTunes has editable Smart Playslits and Regular Playlists at the same time. I can see why the smart group wouldn't be so editable, but I'm not sure that it would necessarily make the entire buddy list uneditable?

That said, offline groups = stupid. Smart groups = good.

This isn't iTunes

What you see is what you get, as it were, and the reason the buddy list would become uneditable is that tracking across smart groups versus regular groups, and moving a contact to a new group based on the drag without doing sorting becomes a massive amount of work with respect to the contact list.

Easy in theory, hard in practice.

Smart groups are definitely an interesting idea for .9 or beyond, but there are still issues with the UI, never mind the backend. Smart playlists work in iTunes because you have a central "library" from which individual tracks are moved into an indefinite number of particular playlists. To replicate this in Adium, you'd want to have a "Contact Library" or somesuch for each account on your list. Then your manually sorted groups would need to have copies of buddies from the various libraries, like a playlist. So, your "Friends" group would have contacts from the Yahoo account library, the AIM account library, etc. that are sorted into some kind of order and then visible or not depending on online/offline status. And then you'd have an option for "Smart groups" that could dynamically create groups of contacts drawn from the libraries or other groups based on conditions like status (online, offline, away, idle, etc.) and whatnot. But the question comes up about whether you'd have the same contact on your list in multiple places and whether there would be options to turn that on or off. And probably most people wouldn't want to see the account libraries, but some people would, so that's another option. And there are other nitpicky details, but I think it's a very interesting idea.

But there's noway that any work should be done on it before .9.

.9 would be quite optimistic. Something you left out carlj7 - server side lists and syncing them appropriately with said contact library, regular groups, or smart groups if so enabled. Applying smart groups to an IM buddy list context is no doubt useful, but also a daunting proposition in some aspects.