Proposal: Messages Window Update

[Colin Barrett]

Some feedback:

- I think the new message bar is too heavy. What we have now is so lightweight, it would be a shame to lose that. It also looks weird that it's so different from the bar immediately to the left.
- Not a fan of the purple in the popovers. Something more blue and/or neutral would work better, perhaps.
- To get to "scripts" you have to click an emoticon icon is definitely suboptimal, as you say. Maybe scripts could work as a floating palette you could turn on & off (or get its own button).
- Why have custom emoticon creation inline? Seems like it's better suited for prefs -- most of the time I would imagine it's something you want to use over and over? I don't actually know though. Just seems to me that something getting placement in the message window should be as lightweight as possible and contain only the most frequently accessed controls.
- What protocols actually support sending and switching emoticon sets? Just MSN? I agree it'd be cool to do that inline, but what about a protocol that didn't do that? What would that look like?
- I would love to see these with some of our default themes put in for the Message View. Could be nice to see how they stack up.
- Having the unread icons and the status icons not being vert aligned makes the list of contacts feel busier than it actually is.
- What does the icon next to Valerie's name mean?
- What's the icon between "+" and "4 chats" mean?
- Why have a count of the number of chats?

These are starting to look pretty slick George. Keep up the good work! :D

-Colin

On Mar 24, 2011, at 10:39 PM, George Lambrou wrote:

> I've finished some new mockups, finally. These ones focus on a proposed relocation of emoticon and script insertion, but I've made some minor aesthetic changes as well (gloss I think, badges, and the message bar). Anyways, without further ado, the mockups:
> 
> <Adium NUI Mockup.png>
> <Empty Custom Emoticon View and Popover Tab Overflow.png>		<Adding a Custom Emoticon.png>		<Scripts Popover.png>
> 
> The big addition here is the Emoticons & Scripts popover, which is activated by a new button in the message bar. It makes emoticon management and scripts funcionality more prominent, and allows for the removal of their toolbar icons*; I was thinking we could possibly even expand this concept to the insertion of links, placing all message insertion tools in the message bar while slimming the look of Adium by allowing the removal of five toolbar icons (Emoticons, Scripts, iTunes, Insert Link, and Insert Link from Browser). That said, placing so much functionality into one button might not be a good thing. A smiley face definitely isn't going to cut it for four different purposes, and I'm not sure if it's the best thing to use for the scripts inclusion either; I only used here it because it made its most used functionality more obvious.
> *Colin and I were discussing possibly relocating/-organizing of some of Adium's toolbar functionality the other day.
> 
> The emoticons side of the popover also provides solutions for tickets #484 and #506.
> 	• #484 Emoticons are now arranged in a grid fashion, with a tooltip showing the shortcut for and name of the icon on hover; separate packs are denoted by tabs in a toolbar near the top of the popover.
> 	• #506 The pencil glyph* in the tab bar represents a user-generated collection of custom emoticons to be sent over networks that support them such as MSN; the creation of each emoticon is facilitated entirely within the popover. Note that this functionality is not intended for the creation of AdiumEmoticonSet bundles; emoticons created here would generally be used by users to supplement the standard emoticons ( :D :S and the like) of downloadable packs with their own.
> 		• *I wasn't too sure about the pencil; I was debating between an OS X user man (for "personal collection"), an iOS-style "compose" glyph, and the pencil; I think it fits reasonably well, but if anyone has any better metaphors, please don't hesitate to throw them out here…
> 
> I've designed the scripts side of the popover to help users better discover and manage message and iTunes scripts. Scripts are categorized in an iOS-style list, sorted depending on the packs that they came from; if there is only one script in a pack, it is grouped in the Other Scripts category, which always appears at the bottom of the list. We could also add a link to get more scripts at the Adium Xtras site to the very bottom of the list.
> 
> One thing about the popovers; I didn't know what Lion's looked like when I designed them, and as such I based their look off of those of the iPad's. If you guys think they need changing, I'll redo them. That said, I quite like the way these turned out, if I may say so myself. ;)
> 
> As usual, all feedback is appreciated; I'm now on IRC as GCL721, so you can get in touch with me in #adium-devl if you want to.
> 
> George Lambrou
> 
> P.S. The lack of a status indicator in Group Chat 1 was intended; it's depicted as an ad-hoc multichat, where there is no global chat status, just that of its participants. Infrastructure mode tabs, like on IRC and XMPP, would have a status icon.