[Adium-devl] Show Offline Contacts should not be the default

[Andre-John Mas]

On 17-Aug-07, at 17:13 , Joe Ranieri wrote:

>> I then watched IM users for the next couple weeks and felt that most
>> non-savvy users I saw had a fairly small contact list.  It seemed
>> reasonable to default Show Offline to yes, catering to the people who
>> want things to Just Work.
>
> I've watched a few n00bs do IM. Both of them have relatively few
> contacts and prefer to see offline contacts. In fact, when I turned
> on hiding of offline contacts, they asked me where their buddies went.
>

Makes sense. I wonder how other clients deal with this sort of thing.
I have had a quick look at MSN and Yahoo! 3.0 and what I see is:

   - MSN shows all off-line people and either groups them in an offline
     section or in the usual group section. There does not seem to
     be a way to hide off-line contacts.

   - Yahoo displays off-line contacts by default, though offers the
     ability to hide off-line contacts from the 'view' menu. One
     advantage is that there are less options in the Yahoo 'view' menu
     since in Adium it gets a little lost.

In fact I don't who influenced who, but Yahoo 3.0 beta 1 certainly has
a similar look to Adium. The icon bar at the bottom could be an  
approach,
though I don't know whether its is necessarily the best place for the
functionality of this thread. Could including it in the contextual menu
be an option?

Andre