Likes, dislikes and a few questions

[ben_]

Hi, so I'm obviously new here and new to Adium (although i have tried it in the past). I just wanted to list some of the things I like and dislike about adium. If you have heard these before, please feel free to ignore them, just wanted to give some feedback.

First what I like:
- Love the options to customise the look of the contact list and message area.
- I love using the tabs!
- Interface is very simple considering how many features it has, congratulations on such an intuitive interface.
- Message logs are well implemented.
- It's free and open source, and better than the alternatives in most respects.

Now the things I feel need to be improved:
- Direct connection and file transfer, however I know the devs are well aware of the problems and are doing everything they can.
- More options to customise message views- I don't like the current system of css styles, I would love it if it had a similar system to the contacts list- with the ability to choose your own colour manually. I think the default styles should include an alternating speech bubble theme similar to iChat. I know there are iChat styles on the extras page but I dislike them because if I try to change the background colour, there is a white box around each speech bubble.
- I would love it if the iChat style thinking bubble could appear to let me know that someone was typing rather than just changing the colour in the contacts list and having their status change to a pencil icon. I think the thinking bubble is a great visual cue, surely it wouldn't be to hard to implement?

Also, i have a few of questions:
1) If I change the contact list window to anything other than a regular window (eg. bubbles), is there a way to access my status button?

2) Can I make the adium status menu bar item stick when i have quit Adium so that I can set my status to available without opening Adium?

3) Is there a way to get Adium to download and update buddy icons for AIM? It didn't seem to download them when I setup so I copied them over from iChat, I'm not sure whether they will update if my buddies change their icon. I have already set "override address book icon with contacts icon".

4) Is there a way to download nightly builds of Adium and if so, can I find out what changes have gone into that build?

Thank-you for taking the time to read my long post!!

Ben

[bgannin]

Answers:

1. Nope (only the menu item if enabled)
2. No, this requires a hack and a helper app.
3. No, it does so automatically. Issues are known with it.
4. No and there won't be.

[Catfish_Man]

Answers:

1. Nope (only the menu item if enabled)
2. No, this requires a hack and a helper app.
3. No, it does so automatically. Issues are known with it.
4. No and there won't be.

To elaborate on these

1 and 2 are planned/hoped for in the future.
3 should be automatic, 1.0 may work better
4, you can download Xcode from Apple, and the Adium code, and compile your own copy of it. The usual warnings about nightly builds apply, but possibly even more so. Also, you can check the timeline and roadmap at http://trac.adiumx.com for what has been done, and what's planned to be done.

[ben_]

Thanks for the info. I'm very impressed with the polish of Adium, it's gone into my dock along with Camino as my favourite open source programs. Thanks for such a great app!