New UI

[Sean Egan]

On 8/2/07, Josh Williams <yurimxpxman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I really hate to have to say this, as I don't enjoy writing
> complaints, but I need to put my $0.02 about the new UI. I have
> several huge gripes about it. It's gotten so bad that I'm very tempted
> to stop using Pidgin altogether.

You provide little in the way of productive criticism, so I doubt this
thread will persist as long as its nearly-identical counterpart, which
is proving useful.

> a) The green circle does not indicate what protocol the user is on

It's not supposed to.

> b) We _do_not_ need to see the person's username right underneath of
> the alias, _especially_ when we don't have an alias set for that
> person! That whole new bar takes up a crapload of space for things I
> don't even want to be there. IMO, all that should be shown besides the
> tab name and chat box is the buddy icon, which should be optional.

You can turn off that "new bar" and then have the same crapload of
space devoted to whatever you want.

> c) It takes more clicks to go to Insert > Smiley. What was wrong with
> the smiley face for emoticons, and a picture emblem for pictures? It's
> very annoying.

This is a bug being addressed for 2.1.1. Our approach to UI
development has, for a while now (at least since 2004 when I first
explicitly applied this strategy), been to release huge sweeping
changes, wait for the initial shock to wear off and then address the
actual problems people have.

We aim to release every three weeks, so this evolution can happen at a
fairly fast pace.