response to http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/414

[Neal Rapoport]

It's even useful on the buddy list like here where I have myself on the 
ME group... I use that to see which protocol's I'm on... SOmetimes I 
turn one off,  (just don't want to be bothered by certain folks), and I 
don't know which is on, unless I alias myself (on all my machines I run 
pidgin on) ...
Also, this shows the different information from the different protocols.
SAMPLE: http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/983/pidginrx0.jpg
But if there's no plans to add it back, (even like I mentioned of 
folders of .png files like the other stuff is in), I can't do anything 
about it.
Thanks
Neal.


Etan Reisner wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 09:18:09PM -0500, Neal Rapoport wrote:
>   
>> I think it'd be useful to know which protocol was used because:
>> 1. When in a message, if the person signed off, MSN & Yahoo cache the
>> message if you reply, but AIM doesn't so you don't know if they are
>> going to get your message.
>>     
> pidgin doesn't let you send the IM if the person is offline on a protocol
> that we don't support offline messages for, so you can't even hit Send in
> a conversation on a protocol that doesn't support it, try it and you'll
> see.
> Even if this had been the case and something you would need to know it
> would only be a reason for the icons being in the conversation window and
> not in the buddy list.
>   
>> 2. MSN doesn't say the total online time or away message when hovering,
>> so you waste time hovering without getting info.
>>     
> MSN would show you the 'personal message' if we supported that, but at the
> moment pidgin does not. It would also show you as much of the away message
> as it can in the buddy list entry itself so hovering would just be for the
> parts of the message that wouldn't fit in the buddy list itself.
> So this would basically boil down to wanting the protocol icons in the
> buddy list so that you can know when hovering over a buddy would show you
> the persons total online time, that doesn't even come close to resembling
> a good reason, for a number of reasons not least of which is the fact that
> that information is incredibly rarely useful and when it is useful taking
> the two seconds to look for it isn't going to be a troubling burden.
>   
>> 3. If you can choose which protocol to IM someone, then you have
>> different smiley choices.  I memorized the keyboard ones for AIM, but i
>> keep getting text, because It sometimes is msn or yahoo.
>>     
> pidgin now uses the same smiley icons locally on all the protocols so this
> doesn't really apply to pidgin clients anymore, also smileys were always
> up to the client to interpret so you never knew what your buddy was seeing
> exactly. And again, this is at best an argument for having the information
> available in the conversation window and not in the buddy list.
>   
>> Maybe create a directory of those images, and then people can upload
>> image-sets of their choosing?
>>     
> The ability to have per-protocol icons (of any kind) doesn't exist in the
> code, there is no way to do it currently. Replacing the green circle with
> any other single icon on the other hand is trivially easy via your gtkrc
> files (as I have stated to numerous people numerous times).
>
> We have more than once admitted that placing the protocol icons into the
> conversation window can be useful for people and we are looking at ways of
> bringing them back, that being said we are not bringing them back to the
> buddy list because they serve no useful purpose there.
>
> 	-Etan
>   

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