Adium Reborn - UI proposal

Fri May 3 13:31:51 UTC 2013

There was a large conversation about a whole redesign that was started by
George Lambrou. Have you looked at that at all?

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 4:21 AM, Daniel Alexander Guzman <animus at uga.edu>wrote:

>  Overall, I like the direction you've taken with the UI. I'm not a *huge* fan
> of Messages, which it seems you've gone to a certain extent emulating, but
> the simplicity definitely does appeal to me. I especially like the removal
> of a lot of the icon clutter, one of my few annoyances with Adium. However,
> the menubar contacts are a bit iffy for me; I very, very rarely use the
> menubar for anything more than display. The only app I use regularly
> resident in it, Mint Quickview, is hardly a favorite of mine for that exact
> reason. Perhaps as an option, for those who choose to use it, but I
> definitely prefer a regular, dedicated window.
>
>  Moreover, the sidebar with current conversations is nice, but I think it
> could be curious to go the route of Google Talk:
>
>  https://www.dropbox.com/s/z5w4yczdz9h21v0/2013-05-03-04.30.48.png
>
>  Rather than a separate list of conversations, it could integrate the
> buddy list and conversations, by moving up and differentiating contacts who
> are currently engaged in conversations with you. This works well and saves
> space.
>
>  The active input is especially curious, and I wonder how useful it'll
> be. I often use a lot of keyboard-driven interfaces (I use Spotlight to
> launch just about everything), but I've never really thought about it for
> my instant messenger. I figure if it's done well, though, I'd use the hell
> out of it.
>
>  Overall, I really do like the more simple and clean direction you took.
> The entire chat 'bubble' style isn't exactly my favorite, so I figure it'd
> be nice (and likely not incredibly hard) to retain the traditional
> configurability of the chat view. Currently, I've got it with something
> clean and simple like so:
>
>  http://cl.ly/image/1o1u3q2l0c41
>
>  Nothing incredibly fancy, but just a preference. I've never been a fan
> of bubbles.
>
>  Overall, though, I love the direction. If this ever does come together
> into something, I'd love to give it a shot.
>
>  On May 2, 2013, at 3:07 PM, Oskar Krawczyk <oskar.krawczyk at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>  Hi Folks,
>
>  Just a quick introduction, my name's Oskar, I'm a UI/UX
> designer/developer.
>
>  Some of you might already know me by the quick... "chat" I had with
> Colin over twitter, yesterday :-)
>
>  You're all probably busy people so I'll get the the point.
>
>  In February, I tweeted about how the messenger market for mac is
> lacking, mentioning Adium in the process. Robert Vehse replied saying that
> if I have a suggestion I should create something, so I teamed up with a
> great UI designer and friend of mine (Dawid), and started working on a
> completely rethought frontend for Adium.
>
>  There were a few private mails between Robert and me just in order to
> have a more presentable version of our proposal, but the word got out (on
> Hacker News), so we need to present what we've came up with now.
>
>  The initial blog post about the Adium Case Study
> http://nouincolor.com/blog/adium-reborn/ (click on the screen for a full
> presentation - click to change the slide).
>
>  Most of the screens from the presentation are self-explanatory. One
> thing that might need some introduction is the Active Input, this is
> basically something like Fantastical has – an intelligent input that
> figures out the stuff you’re trying to do, like:
>
>    - *chat* Robert
>    - *chat* Robert *and* Luke
>    - *message* Robert
>    - *yesterdays* *chat* with Robert
>    - Robert *history* from *yesterday*
>    - *status* away
>    - *add* oskar.krawczyk at gmail.com *to* Friends
>    - …
>
> As I've mentioned before, this UI is not as polished as I'd like it to be.
> Plus, if you guys would be interested in this proposal, Dawid and myself,
> we'd spend more time in refining and getting all of the screens ready.
>
>  I've been using Adium for years (remember this<http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=3655>
>  or this <http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=6218>), as
> much as I like it, I'd love if this project could take a bolder move, and
> adopt a minimalistic UI as we've created - this could potentially open the
> doors to a completely new user-base.
>
>  If you folks are not planning on taking Adium in a slightly different
> direction, no hard feelings, we've tried, and we're happy :-)
>
>  Best Regards,
> Oskar
>
>
>

-- 
Chris Forsythe
@The_Tick <http://twitter.com/The_Tick>
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