cocoaforge

The_Tick wrote:

waffffffle wrote:I want to stress that I am not one of those ancient Mac users that can't let go of features or UI concepts.

Just as a note, this entire thread is a contradiction to this sentence.

Not true. I would PREFER if contact circles were an actively developed feature that could be better integrated into the direction that Adium is moving. I do not long for the past but instead believe that this one concept should be part of Adium's future. I have already let go of this feature, as I have been using Adium without it for almost 2 years.

In my job I deal with Mac users who complain daily about changes Apple makes. They complain about every minute detail of the UI changing and the vast majority of the time the user is just unable to accept the fact that the concept that they're used to is outdated and needed to be let go. (For example, I met someone recently who was complaining that iTunes is now ugly and refused to upgrade to iTunes 5 or 6. Obviously this person is just stubborn and refuses to see the benefit of the changes made.)

However there are rare instances where an older UI concept is still superior to what we have today. Contact circles do provide an advantage over what is currently available in Adium. I have changed the way I use Adium in order to work around the fact that contact circles no longer exist. This has slowed my IM usage and made me less effective since I cannot discern as much information by quickly glancing at my buddy list and must instead spend time mousing over each user and comparing idle times.

I completely respect the developers decision to remove contact circles based on the criteria that they have outlined. It basically comes down to the fact that there are a small minority of people who want this feature and the way it was previously implemented it seemed to be holding back Adium's progress. This I understand.

The reason why I want to open up this discussion is to figure out a way to make it worth some developer's time to re-create this feature. Again, ideally this feature would be part of Adium and could grow and change in the future as Adium progresses but seeing as how the developers don't see contact circles fitting into Adium's future it will probably need to remain a third-party plugin.

Just to let everyone know, if I do end up commissioning this work, one of the requirements will of course be that all code be open source. I am hopeful that once the basic work is done there will be enough support and usage of the plugin that more people will get behind its maintenance and development. If more people realize the value and benefit of this feature then maybe at some point down the road the Adium community as a whole will wish to include contact circles within the main project.

waffffffle wrote:It basically comes down to the fact that there are a small minority of people who want this feature

I'm looking at the *only one.*

zac wrote:

waffffffle wrote:It basically comes down to the fact that there are a small minority of people who want this feature

I'm looking at the *only one.*

There's no possible metric for that except that nobody else has remained persistant about the issue over time... and 'over time' means quite a bit of time in the case of status circles. There was a small minority -- but definitely larger than a minority of one -- who were vocally upset when the feature was initially removed. Many of those, so far as we could tell, simply didn't understand that some other form of visual status indication other than contact labels would be implemented.

I'm starting to think this thread is going off topic. We know Evan will write a plugin if waffffffffffffffffle finds the money.

Kiel :-)

Arenzera wrote:I'm starting to think this thread is going off topic. We know Evan will write a plugin if waffffffffffffffffle finds the money.

Kiel :-)

Ya, I agree. wafffff^23les has a way to contact Evan, I'm going to lock it since that is what you wanted.