[Adium-devl] Twitter IM integration

[Ryan Govostes]

On May 15, 2008, at 12:54 PM, Colin Barrett wrote:

> Well, I never sent that mockup, but I just checked in [22349], which
> has the character counter I was talking about in it.

Hm. Just installed this and gave it a go. It's a bit buggy (like my  
text not showing up!), but I'll comment only on the feature as  
implemented, *not* having seen the original (which I assume just put  
the character count in the same place).

- If I hadn't read your commit message, I would be totally clueless as  
to what this grid is that doesn't appear in any other message.

- You also don't get any feedback until you've typed 125 characters,  
which is long enough that I'll probably not associate message length  
with changes to the grid until I've experimented for a little while.  
If I'm at 124 characters and plan on typing a few more words, I'll be  
frustrated when I do hit the limit. 16 characters is at most three  
short words.

- If I paste a long message, the grid immediately becomes gray, but  
doesn't suggest how much I need to cut.

- If the grid is outside your peripheral vision, you're not going to  
see it anyway; if you're watching the grid, you might miss typos /  
whatever.

- There may be accessibility concerns, though I can't speak  
authoritatively.


I would propose putting the number of characters currently typed, in  
grey, at the end of the text (as if it were an autocomplete  
suggestion). At the point where we run over the limit, draw an  
indicator after the last character (e.g. a cross between unicode  
characters 02D0 and 2050). If our message is going to be split, we can  
just have multiple indicators.

If we're really flashy about it, we could have an animated visual cue  
to indicate when and where the limit was hit.


Just my two cents.

Regards,
Ryan Govostes