Re: The noninclusion of Gaim

[Shahms King <shahms shahms com>]

On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 09:57, Sean Egan wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 18:48, Mark Finlay wrote:
> > Even assuming that this is true it does not mean that
> > a) it is the best IM client that will ever be written in gtk
> 
> But it does have a nice five year head start.
> 
> > Even if gaim maintainers could be convinced to move to Gnome cvs etc...
> 
> You'd be very hard pressed to convince us to move to GNOME CVS.  We've
> been with Sourceforge for years, and they've been very good to us.  We
> don't want to abandon them.
> 
> > they are not on boards the Gnome philosophy as far as I can tell. Gaim
> > would really need a massive UI and usability overhaul to "fit in" with
> > the Gnome desktop IMHO
> 
> I use Gaim and GNOME all the time and think they "fit in" together very
> well.  Gaim follows the GNOME HIG very well, follows appropriate
> freedesktop.org specifications.  I'd be interested in hearing what needs
> to be "overhauled."

I love GAIM (and it is by far the best AIM client, on any platform, at
the moment).  That said, the Preferences stuff could *still* use a lot
of work.  There has never been a GAIM release with a coherent,
minimalistic, preferences page.  That is the one place where I see
GAIM's goals not coinciding with GNOME's (nor do I see that changing any
time soon, you'd have all kinds of unhappy users if you started removing
configuration options).  Among the GNOME-superfluous options are the
Proxy settings and Browser settings.  Both of these can be set from
within GNOME and simply clutter the dialog.

> > I think that gaim should be the galeon of IM and for Gnome we need
> > something that fits in better with the goals of Gnome.
> 
> Good luck, then.
> 
> -s.
-- 
Shahms King <shahms shahms com>