So about 6 months ago, maybe a year, Adam and I started talking about random things as we always did. We hit upon the fact that the im paradigm hasn't really evolved in the last 10 years. There has always been a contact list, and there has always been a message view.
Now, tabs/sidebars/log viewers/themes/emoticons got tossed around, but nothing about the initial parts, the parts that are exponentially valuable compared to the others, had really changed.
So we got to thinking more. Well, you really do need the message window, we thought. But that contact list, it's kinda bla. I generally don't use it myself, and Adam doesn't either.
Eventually all that discussion lead to this blog post:
http://www.adiumx.com/blog/2005/05/why-contact-list.php
There was enough good feedback from that to say that yes, some people may think they require the contact list, but if it were removed or changed in some way, they might not need it
as bad. Now, this isn't to say it would go away, but it was a nice enough idea to discuss.
About that time we started doing mockups too. Eventually we ended up with the following, in no specific order. These are mockups, are not coded, and will probably never be coded.
Out of this whole thing, these are my favorites:
This is where it all got kinda cool in thought. The buddy bar was a bastardization of a feature Adam wanted to add, called "whitey". I don't know why the name was chosen, and I can't think of what it was, but I remember it being cool in thought.
Basically you would throw your friends up there, the 4 or 5 or whatever you needed to know the status of ALL THE TIME. For me, this would be the wife and a few others.
The rest went into the Buddies Pane. It was searchable, it was groupable, and you could add smart groups. Think iTunes meets iCal meets Address Book. It was neat.
We were going to call it Adium Pro, or Rawr, but it's never happened, and probably will never happen.
So ya, a sidebar has been thought about. But in the end, the tabs rule. There are usability issues with both, and it's easier to just have the one thing.
If you want to see the other mockups, go to
http://brok3n.org/rawr/
Oh, and a drawer won't happen.