Pidgin 2.1 UI Ideas (with mockups!)

[Andrew Roeder]

On 8/06/07, Luke Schierer lschiere at pidgin.im wrote:

>I think that many people do just that.  Icons get changed to reflect
>mood, and if you don't notice someone's icon changed, you are in some
>odd way failing to respond to that person.  It is childish, but then
>we've seen that sort of behavior typify IM users again and again.

>luke

Would it be more intelligible to make the info pane resizable and change the 
icon sized based on this? I really don't know, or think so.

Personally I like having the constant icon size, just that the current 32x32 
is too small, I think at 50x50 its reasonable to say I can make out much 
easier what icons are displaying, even when they are shrunk from 96x96(which 
ofcourse is still displayed on mouseover, so it will be much easier when the 
information is displayed over buddy-icon-hovering.)

I for one also love Steven's addition of a protocol(send to) icon in the 
infopane, it is visually appealing, shows you protocol information for a 
conversation at-a-glance, and much more user friendly than Send-to(I've 
personally had to explain to many users how to correctly use send-to, I 
would figure it'd be the same for everyone else.)


As I stated in another mailing list post and created my own mockup:

http://www.endcompany.com/storage/pidginfuture.jpg

Ofcourse in my mock-up, mainly I wanted to remove the descriptions of 
buttons, I still feel that they are not needed, if a user is unable to 
understand its purpose simply by picture, they will understand its purpose 
by clicking the button anyway, and then know from that point forward in 
their Pidgin experience.

Infopane is rather empty now, but I quickly foresee it becomes crammed with 
relative information(Not a bad thing.) ;)

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