I'm not upset and I''m not going to ignore the thread
I knew when I wrote it that it didn't match iChat's, but having a dynamic emoticon menu of any sort was a vast improvement to just trying to remember what to type (as was the case prior.) I'm hoping to get to it at some point, so feedback is of course welcome.
hmm dunno if you will like this but what about something like http://amendmentapp.com/ or just one of those automatic spellers where as your typing the word a list underneath shows up with possible endings for what word your trying to type except for emoticons. For instance :- (then the following would be displayed: ( ) X ! o ) It would also be an option to have something like that so it wouldn't if a user doesn't want it enabled they can just turn it off or it's off by default.
bgannin wrote:I was just saying that iChat has like 20 emoticons overall, while Adium has potentially tons of them because of emoticonsets.
We can cut that down dramatically (in some cases) by picking only the emoticons packs that match the current protocol. The rest of the packs can still live in the "regular" menu (what we have now).
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
--Albert Einstein
bgannin wrote:I was just saying that iChat has like 20 emoticons overall, while Adium has potentially tons of them because of emoticonsets.
We can cut that down dramatically (in some cases) by picking only the emoticons packs that match the current protocol. The rest of the packs can still live in the "regular" menu (what we have now).
This may work in some cases, but I can see it being more problematic. One reason would be several services don't have emoticon packs that specify for them at all AFAIK but more importantly it creates an odd dependency for feature activation that the user has to somehow intuit (i.e., "what do I have to do to get the 'spiffy' menu instead of this other one I don't like - where's the preference?")
Thanks bgannin - for giving it some thought. After a good nights sleep I realise that i was maybe too excited getting my proposition out. But atlease you took it with good spirit.
I seem to agree that the best way may not be to provide a dynamic table, but at least simplify what we do display. I think The_Tick has a good idea, and expanding on that might be what we are looking for.
What you have there wouldn't really work in a menu, the way people expect menus to act on OS X -- i.e. be accessible only through hover actions.
If we were to do that, it wouldn't be so much a menu as some sort of popup window, that activated upon clicking some sort of button in the UI (perhaps something similar to what iChat has?)
This would also solve the issue of us having to use strange APIs, since we wouldn't actually be in a menu anymore.
We currently have Insert Emoticon menus in the contextual menu for the input box and the Edit menu. Those would have to either go away or continue using the current scheme.
It's a decent solution, but it's definitely not a menu.
