Pidgin Refresh

[Kevin Stange]

On 10/27/2012 07:47 AM, Steven Ferreira wrote:
> It should be rewritten and learn of his mistakes and perhaps follow new
> design guidelines.

In our development process, we rewrite parts of the application
periodically as new features require it, though some code that has
worked well hasn't been touched in a long time.

We are not planning to rewrite the entire application.

> The importance of Pidgin will become smaller and smaller.

In the time I've worked on Pidgin we haven't been terribly concerned
with the "importance" of Pidgin so much as that it's a good IM client
that does what our user base and developers like it to.

We are not driven by sales or marketing and don't really care what our
competition is doing, unless something they do strikes us as worth
bringing over for the benefit of our users.

We have never been a GNOME application and have always resisted the
suggestion simply because it put constraints on how we design and
develop Pidgin.  For that same reason, becoming part of any other
desktop environment is unlikely to happen.

> As Pidgin uses GTK as a toolkit it should only concentrate on the Linux
> platform. It should use GTK3 and even follow a completely new design
> concept.

The 3.0.0 release of Pidgin will support GTK3.  I can't recall whether
we finalized the decision to make this a requirement or an option.  I
think stability of GTK3 for Windows is a part of this decision.

> Features of this im client would be :
> 
> - Single window for the contacts and conversation
> - Conversation Themes
> - Super simple Interface
> - No Menu-bar
> - Using telepathy tubes
> - ...

Our user interface is about as simple as I can stand without losing
functionality.  Putting the contacts and conversation in the same window
does not seem like a good design decision.

Removing the menu bar would require removing functionality or just
covering the windows with buttons for various features, which is
certainly not a simpler UI.

Conversation themes will be coming with webkit integration in version 3.0.0.

At the core of Pidgin is libpurple which is already a robust framework
for supporting IM services.  Dumping all that work in favor of using
telepathy seems awful.

It would also not be a nice thing to do to several other projects that
depend on libpurple.

> Another possibility is to modify pidgin but for doing that it has to
> follow the elementary standards like no menu-bar, the gui should be very
> simple to use and it should be written as much as possible in Vala.

There is no chance of Pidgin moving from plain C to any other language.

Kevin

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