[Adium-devl] Adium iPhone

[Peter Hosey]

On 2009-01-22, at 08:39, David Smith wrote:
> What does Adium for the iPhone actually mean?

Since we'll have to start clean anyway, I think we should start small:

- A limited set of services. AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, the XMPP family, and  
ICQ. Bonjour would also be extremely handy on an iPhone.
- No push or related functionality. If we start small, there's a  
chance that Apple's push API won't be available yet by the time we  
deploy, anyway.
- Almost no Xtras. Status icons: Two sets (colors and B&W) and that's  
it. Maybe sound sets. Otherwise, WYSIAYG.
- No WebKit Message View. Think back to the 0.50 days: We heavily  
debated pursuing WebKit because it was measurably slower than the  
Standard (Cocoa-drawn) Message View on the machines of the day. That  
includes my 450 MHz G4 Cube. The iPhone is about as fast as my Cube.
- Transcription. We'd need to pass transcripts to desktop Adium at  
sync time. I have no idea whether that's possible. Users must be able  
to turn this off and burninate all transcripts, since not everyone  
uses desktop Adium.

We can add more later—not just push (when it's ready and reliable),  
but also more services as we prove the reliability of the main ones.  
Facebook would be the first one to add; the above plan gives us time  
to pound on it on the desktop first.

Design-wise:
- Root view is a contact list.
- Tapping a contact takes you to a chat with that contact.
- Three filters (segmented control at the bottom of the CL): Chats  
Only, Online Contacts, All Contacts.
- Completely eat any distinction between services. The only exception  
should be a segmented control (or other UI) at the top of the chat  
view for switching which service you're chatting with them on.

Future features:
- In the chat view, allow rotation to landscape. Some people prefer  
that orientation for typing.
   There won't be room in landscape to show the message view and  
inputline at the same time, so we'd need to either provide a way to  
switch between message view and inputline (perhaps a couple of finger- 
sized buttons at the right side of the inputline), or show the  
inputline only, along with a count of waiting messages.