I HATE the lack of protocol icons

[Eric Seelig]

Or to be more accurate, I dislike the new icons in general.  The clock icon
was initially confusing as to whether it meant away or idle, the new "now
online" icon with an arrow pointing AWAY FROM the buddy list is certainly
confusing enough, all of the green dots are rather annoying to look at, and
in spite of the fact that you stonewalled on several valid responses on
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/414, there are several good reasons why
there should be *at least an option* to retain the multiple/old icons, and
"I don't want to code it again" isn't really a good argument for the
opposite, when what a lot of users find appealing about one piece of
software over another is the basic design/UI.
 
For one thing, I don't like to use "show buddy details" to see identifying
buddy icons, because I usually can't see my full buddy list that way, so the
protocols did help visually to identify some users.  When I know that a few
given friends only might be using Google Talk or MSN, the corresponding icon
helps to more immediately identify that the person online is one of only a
certain few: "Hey, that can only either be Fabio or Karen, and neither are
online much - I should send a message."  Likewise, while most of my friends
in the US use AIM, most of my overseas friends use MSN, so that in itself is
a sort of automatic visual organization.  And finally, YES, YES, it very
much helps to know whether someone is using AIM or Google Talk at the time,
no matter what you say, and I don't want to have to dig around and "expand"
anything to know whether or not I can send the person a file at the moment.
The quote-unquote fix of creating two separate names with "(MSN)" or
something tacked on the end is pretty lame.  You know how annoying it is
when cell phone address books won't let you share a name between home and
mobile numbers, and you have to type everything out to differentiate the
two?  Yeah, that's what you just did.
 
When you were Gaim, you svengalied me away from using Trillian and meebo.com
- meebo for Google functionality, and Trillian for sending files.  If this
doesn't change soon, I'll probably change back.  Such is the fickleness of a
user looking at unnecessarily poor design.
 
Eric
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