http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/2367 - 2.1.0 GUI

[Sean Egan]

On 8/1/07, Andrew Roeder <correnthean at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I'll try not to resent you for the loss of my protocol-icon-in-buddy-list.
> Its not bad to change the GUI, but if the goal is to reach a design that is
> more appropriate for everyone, it would be much easier to transition older
> users over by considering the reasons why they specifically want something
> in some place or way, rather than designing to meet the needs of users who
> have problems with the -old- gui with no compromise between the two.

How can we improve on that? I wrote a blog article weeks ago outlining
the new changes. There were tons of debates on the mailing list, the
results of which seemed to have reached the best compromise. And now,
we're listening to feedback. If there's anything we can do better, let
me know.

As for the protocol icons, nobody has yet to make an argument
convincing enough for me to believe that the protocol is something you
need at-a-glance. However, I'm giving strong consideration to ticket
#2146

> Really my feelings are that all the old toolbar options were needed as they
> gave Pidgin more of a consistent design with other "text editing/messaging"
> programs, other than those my most commonly used ones are get info and
> enable logging.  Most of the clutter was being created by the 8 different
> font icons, I think if we can narrow that down to the only toolbar button
> needing a dropdown menu we could even focus on thinking of new features that
> would be useful on the toolbar.

So you'd suggest:

Font ⌄ | Smiley | Link | Image

> I'm not sure if you've touched on this, but the lack of icons/text examples
> in the font dropdown menu are currently where it falls short.  And I really
> think the "reset font" button, deserves to be placed under "fonts".

The Font menu was originally supposed to have each of its members
actually formatted like in Tomboy, its inspiration
(http://actsofvolition.com/images/screenshots/pidgin/tomboy-formatting.png).
We should do this for 2.1.1.

I also agree about the Reset Formatting button; I think its very
existence is a work-around to a bug, which is mostly fixed in 2.1.1,
and we should definitely remove it from such prominence, and perhaps
remove it entirely.

-s.