Developers, Community, Progress

[Benjamin Arnaud]

Hey there,
I'm developping a Qt client for libpurple which will soon be released for 
the windows platform. (most likely in GPL)

My goal was to make the interface as easy as possible.
And something more like Adium as opposed to the pidgin's GTK which doesn't 
look so good, especially on windows.
Honestly Adium is the IM app I would love to have on my windows pc.

I don't like windows popping out of nowhere, so my UI uses 2 windows or one 
if you dock them period.
And I have MSN like events. But nothing will ever pop up, which eventually 
conflicts a little bit with purple requests.

I also thought improvements could be made on the plugin side, think about 
it: you have a dozen of protocols, you could do insane things. But not all 
users are genuine coders, so you have to provide a simple framework to start 
with.

Using the latest Qt 4.4 release candidate I've achieved quite good results. 
(even though the app is still too heavy on memory):
http://bunjeee.free.fr/zeSteam.png

I don't have the specific menus for each protocol I've implemented 
(currently XMPP & MSN).
>From my point of view, in most situations that's not the proper way for 
doing it.

And beside, I think libpurple shouldn't dictate when and the content of 
contextual menus or dialboxes.
So there should be getters and setters for practically everything.

So I emulated the requests myself using my code and data structures, so that 
the user wouldn't bother.
And I did a generic Identity page: http://bunjeee.free.fr/zeSettings.png

I have an editline which is supposed to specify a "Nickname" for every 
account that can have one. (Server name for MSN, Nick for XMPP and so on...)
Any plan on implementing purple_account_set_server_name_for_all() or 
something like that ?

Now that purple supports lots of prpl, wouldn't that be great if we could 
add more generic fields than just status and status custom line ?

The big "plus" for purple isn't to support dozens of protocols, it's to make 
the user able to control as much of them at the same time.

I don't care about webcams or sounds, I care about great user inferface, and 
awesome automated plugin system.
I think that on windows platform: pidgin "made well" could be the mozilla 
firefox of the IM.