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What Makes a Good IM Client?
thesaint05 asks: "So I was sitting here at my job where and IM is a pretty integral part of communicating intra-office. However, I have 3 different clients installed, and each has a different user base. Within the office we have an SIP server and use Windows Messenger. The Google Talk client is for colleagues and friends on the cutting edge, and AIM is used by pretty much everybody else (including a bunch of clients). So, after holding 3 different conversations simultaneously on all 3 clients (Windows Messenger with a colleague, AIM with my girlfriend, and Google Talk with a friend at a different tech company) I got to wondering, what are the strengths and weaknesses of all of these clients? Which do you use and why? If you could combine features from all of the IM clients out there, what would they be?"
The advantages of ICQ (over AIM) with the default clients are:
1. Offline messages. Extremely handy for a lot of things.
2. Stored History. Unbelievably useful when trying to find something someone mentioned to you 6 months ago. Grepping through the licq history has been a livesaver for me. AIM clients can of course implement it too, but a lot of them don't for some bizarre reason, or they require you to manually tell it where to store files.
I read the internet for the articles.
A good protocol is useless if the people you are trying to keep in touch with aren't using it. I use AIM solely because that's what all of my friends use. Chat_Client_X might be better but if the people I need to keep in contact with aren't using it, what's the point?
By your logic the only way to switch protocols would be if all your friends did so simultaneously or if you got new friends. Thus you are locked in forever. Here's an out. Set up your own Jabber server for you and your friends and configure it to have a bridge to the protocol you are currently using. Then you can still chat with the same people over the same protocol, but you can also chat with people over Jabber and if both you and the other person are using Jabber you can have end-to-end encryption and a secure server. If enough people switch over via this method, we can all ditch these proprietary walled gardens and everyone will be able to chat with everyone using the client of their choice.
I'd rather everyone have a numeric id, but not sequential. Unique id should be the hash of your public key, which is then used for verification/encryption.
You then do the rest icq style. I still don't remember my uncles icq uin, nor do I know his aim screenname, but I know if I type his name in the Find User dialog, I'd find his icq account. Long aim screennames are no easier considering aols db is merged with netscape/compuserve/a few other services by now. The number of unused old accounts wasting space is astonishing. I couldn't even register my full name as a screenname because it was already in use.
Unique numeric ids keep people from fighting over that stuff, and rarely have to actually be displayed, you just display the nick they set as the displayname. Then only show the numeric id in case of duplicate names when trying to find people. Even then you dont have to show the full digits, you can use graphical representation of the key. Forgot the name of the tech, but it looked promising when used for PKI.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I had never heard of this before. Impressive. It worked fine, except there were positioning problems with some elements (floating scrollbars 0 using latest Gecko). But overall, that's pretty damn swanky.
GAIM actually automatically translates some common netspeak into proper english. "k" is translated to "Okay", and "u" to "You" for example. Not really all that useful since it only applies to outgoing messages, but if we could get everyone to use Gaim it would probably cut down on some of that crap people try to pass off as english. Plus it has a spell checker.
Having a spell checker in my IM client is probably the single most useful feature I've ever had in any program I've ever used.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"