I posted this in another reply. "touch" works, yes. Using a makefile to compile something doesn't, much of the time. (It's not 100% failure, but it's not 100% success, either.) I experienced this bug just last week while compiling GD for use with a PHP project I was working on. Apple may claim it's fixed, but it's not.
Yeah. I had to use it on a borrowed iBook a few months ago to get back some data that OS X deleted from my text clippings.
I thought they looked cool at first, and then I tried them, and oh man. They go completely counter to Apple's basic design philosophy, they make for a lot of useless clutter, and there's no precident on how they should be used efficiently. I'm glad they got rid of those, very glad.
So because you personally couldn't figure out how to use them efficiently, they should be removed? I didn't realize you were king of the universe.
If you care, I found a way to use them efficiently and it took me ages to get used to working without them again. For me, tabbed folders was one of those features like Expose where once you get used to it, you keep looking for it on other computers and sigh in disappointment when you realize it doesn't work on all computers. It just became part of my workflow, and I was never more productive.
I'm not so much an egotist to say that any feature I can't figure out how to use efficiently should be removed. (I've never figured out Labels, for instance.) But I think it's reasonable to expect version 10 of a product to have feature parity with version 9 of the same product.
Open in New Window - I railed on Microsoft when they first came up with the "open in exiting window" idea, but ya know what? I've gotta hand it to them (yes, I know, this was originally implemented in some Linux builds, but I hadn't used any yet), they were right to have done so.
I have no problem whatsoever with Apple *adding* this feature. My issue is that in the process, they completely screwed up the spatial window management we had before and haven't ever fixed it. If you like browser-style file management, then great! But the users who like spatial file management are up a creek with no paddles to be found.
Bottom line, Classic was good for its day, but and OSX finder definitely has room for improvement, but saying that OS9s Finder was better than OSX is just kidding yourself
I was much more productive with Classic's Finder than I've ever been with OS X's. In the end, that's all that matters to me.
No problems with thumbnails here, and I go through a LOT of them. For... research purposes, yeah. Even partial or corrupt ones have no effect (although until 10.4, they could crash the Finder, so this may be old information). Windows is snappier because it caches the thumbnails, and can end up with them being out of date.
It may be old information. Frankly, I don't sort large folders of images in OS X anymore because I've had such horrible experiences with it in the past.
And Windows is snappier even when you don't consider caching. Windows is snappier generating them in the first place over a fileshare from my Mac... it's frequently finished before OS X is, even when OS X has a head start. And unless Windows is psychic, there's no way it could have seen those images before the network connection was made.
Thumbs.db, anyone?
Huh? What does this mean?
Tabbed folders - missed them for about 5 minutes, then discovered the Dock. Could you dig down through multiple levels of folders with a click like you can with the Dock? No. And with Leopard, they're spring loaded finally.
No, but you could easily do that in the Apple menu since Mac OS 7, so it's not like the Dock is giving you something revolutionarily new.
I used the tabbed folders as drag&drop targets, so I have all my handy apps ready to drag stuff too. You could pop up one folder containing documents, drag the file to another folder containing apps, drop it on the target, and poof all the folders neatly file themselves away and you have your document ready to go. Plus the tabs never got covered up by apps, so they were always handy to use. And you didn't have to wait the.5 seconds the Dock makes you wait before it opens the folder up.
Whether or not you personally found them useful, you had to admit that it's pretty fishy for version 10 of a product to have far fewer features than version 9 of the same product. Apple should have at least gotten back to feature parity before adding things like 'Smart Folsders'. Which, while fancy, I find a lot less useful than tabbed folders were.
Clipping support. Yes, they were useful, but this is the best you've got?
Did you not read it? Deleting my list of passwords? Silently, without even giving me the courtesy of an error message? You seriously find this acceptable behavior? (Thankfully, I had a backup, but it was a huge pain trying to get those clippings copied into something OS X likes. I had to use Classic mode on a borrowed laptop.)
I know OS X can read resource forks. There's absolutely no excuse for Finder not automatically converting the old-style text clippings into the new-style ones.
And of course, you can't do as much with the new ones as you could with the old, so it's another case of version 10 of the product having fewer features than version 9.
You most certainly do NOT have to "prod" the Finder to show new files. Kernel file notifications were added in 10.4 and work fine. Go ahead, open a window then "touch foo" in the terminal - the file will appear as soon as you hit enter.
"touch" works, yes. I think that's as far as Apple actually tested it.
When a makefile creates files while building a downloaded package, they often don't show up. Same with un-gzipping files. And some other operations. I concede that it works in more cases in 10.4 than it did in previous cases, but it still doesn't work 100% of the time like any modern file browser should. (Note: I experienced this just last week while compiling the GD library for use with PHP.)
Otherwise, it's just fine. Despite the whining, it has made a lot of progress since 10.0.
And despite the progress, it still doesn't work as well as the Finder that came with OS 9 did. Seriously.
Look, I love Apple products, and I'm not saying Finder is a bad program. What I'm saying is that it's the worst program Apple ships. Given Apple's high level of quality, it's still pretty good.
The Dock is managed by a process named (for some strange reason;) "Dock." Open up Activity Monitor and you can see it listed.
Finder is the name of Mac OS's file browser. It's roughly equivalent to Explorer.exe on Windows, except Explorer manages both the taskbar and the file browser, and Finder only manages the file browsing. Like Explorer, it's a pretty essential part of the OS... it's the first thing everybody sees when they log in, it manages filesharing connections, disk mounting and unmounting, and various other things (like DotMac syncing.) I think it also controls logging in and out, but I may be wrong there.
Maybe I'm just an old dog who's no good and new tricks, but I hate the "browser"-type stuff. I want a 100% fully spatial Finder, like we had in every single version of Mac OS until 10. It wasn't broken, and it shouldn't have been "fixed."
If they wanted to add a browser mode in addition to the normal Finder mode, that would be fine with me-- as long as they didn't break the normal Finder mode in the process.
Sorry, I'm new to mac.... what is so crummy about the Finder in Tiger? I've had some difficulties using it, but always penned it as user error. What was good about previous implementations?
It has terrible usability design, with two "modes" (a Windows-esque 'browser' mode, and a Mac Classic 'spatial' mode), neither of which work correctly. The Spotlight UI, in particular, is almost criminally complex and quirky... a Linux/Windows user might not notice it, but to a Mac Classic user it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. People used to Classic are driven spare by the Command-N keyboard shortcut that used to create a new folder, but now creates a new window-- even in Spatial mode (which makes no sense.)
If you have make the horrible error of trying to open a network drive when the network it's on is no longer available (you know, like the huge number of people who use wifi on their laptops), Finder will freeze for minutes at a time. Finder will also freeze for several minutes if you have the audacity to drag-and-drop files to the desktop from some applications. DotMac will also freeze Finder for several minutes if it attempts to sync itself while on an un-reliable network. There's no multi-threading whatsoever.
Opening a window with a large number of images will frequently crash Finder as it creates thumbnails. And no, it's not a corrupt image file, because if I do the same view in Windows, Windows will create the thumbnails in seconds with no errors. When Finder's image previews do work, generating them is super-slow.
It's still missing features that were in Mac Classic, like tabbed folders. (Although to be fair, they have added Labels back in and Pop-Open drag&drop.) Text clippings are nearly useless, as you can no longer drag them directly into a word processor/edit field (like in OS 9), nor can you select and Copy text from them. Oh, and Finder will silently delete the contents of old Mac Classic text clippings, so I hope you didn't have a bunch of important passwords in one or anything... oops!
If you create a new file on the CLI, it still won't show up right away in Finder. You frequently have to 'prod' Finder into showing it, by closing and re-opening the window, or creating a new folder and then deleting it.
It's just bad. Given, a bad Macintosh file browser is still as good as the average Linux or Windows file browser, but that's not much of an excuse, especially for us old-school Mac users. I'd be happy if they fixed some of the more blatant bugs and added tabbed folders, even if it's not a total re-write.
They've gone, what, 5 releases without fixing (much) in Finder; what makes you think they'll fix it this time around? Wasn't it 10.3 where Apple claimed they were re-writing Finder from scratch, and we ended up with almost the exact same mess of poor usability and terrible bugs we were using before? Hell, I'd be happy if it just didn't utterly freeze for minutes at a time when your network got disconnected-- it's like the Finder programmers never heard of wifi!
It's sad when the one application that is hard-coded to run on every boot for every user is the worst application Apple makes.
It certainly doesn't help that, in this case, the standards absolutely suck. It's hard to convince anybody to use standards when the 'standard' version of the page doesn't let you do simple things you want to do without tons of workarounds and nasty hacks. Like center an image vertically. Or anything related to AJAX.
I've love to be able to do simple math in CSS. I should be able to set an attribute to 1em + 5px, but right now you can't. Your idea about giving CSS references to attributes that you could refer back to in other attributes is good, also.
Oh please. Everybody on the Internet always complains that everything is too expensive. It gets old. The company pricing the product knows a heck of a lot more about the market and their customers than random Internet users, and I can guarantee that these "almost outrageously expensive" prices will also be almost outrageously popular.
The true measure of whether something is too expensive is whether people buy it. If customers are buying it, then it's not too expensive.
While I generally agree with you, at least the low-end Xbox 360 was upgradeable to be identical to a high-end one at a fairly reasonable price. That's not true of the PS3, and I think that's the real problem Sony faces... if their low-end was upgradeable to a high-end, it probably would be much more popular.
In theory it is. But if that's all it takes to be a big deal, I can point the press to hundreds of MUDs and MUSHes that have been doing the same thing for decades.
In reality, it's crummy software populated primarily with pedophiles and furry fetishists. Most of those MUDs and MUSHes aren't.
Considering the amount of staff they've hired recently in Kirkland, WA, and the fact that we have a huge and healthy tech industry I'd expect a Seattle (or western-Washington) event. Very disappointing.
Everyone know Microsoft can't get anything right until the third attempt. This is only the second.
Microsoft's hardware has always been spot-on. I love their home networking routers and wireless cards, and I'm kind of upset they stopped making them. (My 802.11g router from Microsoft has been by far the most reliable home networking device I've ever owned.) Same with their keyboards and mouses. And the Xbox.
Also, their Office products for Mac were pretty damn good even in the first incarnation in the mid-80s, at least as good as the OS and technology of the time would allow.
Also, it's "everyone knows". If you're going to throw out unfounded flamebait statements, at least use better grammar.
I was gonna comment on it. But after reading Slashdot for awhile, you kind of get numb to the moronic psuedo-English that shows up in almost every story. Plus I couldn't think of a really good punchline.
No, I mean like "I drag a file into your Jabber IM window and you receive that file." I don't give a crap about experimental this and proposed draft that, I just want something that works and works now. MSN and AIM work now to transfer files, Jabber doesn't.
If you can show me a working Jabber client that does this, I've love to see it. I've never seen one.
DId you miss the second screenshot where the window was halfway off the screen with no way to move or resize it? It's not like that was a small monitor, it was 1024x768... GAIM didn't even slightly attempt to make the window fit the screen. And I don't have screenshots of the dozen times it crashed. Even if it didn't look like cat barf, there's still the HUGE NUMBER OF BUGS keeping me from using it. In fact, I'd prefer the bugs me fixed before the horrible appearance be fixed anyway.
The real problem is that I have a lot of open source-loving friends who always tell me programs like GAIM are the best thing ever and if I don't use them I'm going to hell. Then when I do use them, I get this half-finished ugly, buggy technology that disappoints greatly. Then a couple years later, I get the "oh, it's much better now" spiel and, stupidly, I try it again, and it's still half-finished, ugly and buggy.
Adium, with its current OS X appearance assuming Windows widgets, would actually probably look pretty good in Windows if it was ported. In fact, even if it didn't use Windows widgets, it would look fine in Vista. It's all a pipe-dream, though, since Adium is developed by some of those obnoxious Mac users who refuse to port useful software. See also: TextMate, SubEthaEdit. I hate those people even more than I hate people who tell me to use half-finished open source software.
Yes, yes, Jabber is great and it's XML and it takes out the trash every tuesday morning.
But AIM and MSN transfer files. Jabber doesn't. That's a HUGE oversight that's yet to be fixed. Until Jabber has feature-parity with MSN and AIM (and I don't mean the goofy stuff like' nudges', just the ability to transfer files and in-line images), it'll never really catch on. You're not going to get people to switch from A to B if B doesn't do what A does.
AIM is the only one of those non-standardized protocols that can consistently transfer files from one computer to another. Until at least one of the other ones can, I'd like it to stick around.
It couldn't be any worse than the current version: ugly and buggy.
I'd give my right ankle for a port of Adium to Windows, or any other platform than OS X for that matter. It's the only multi-protocol IM client that doesn't suck. (Well, it still sucks for file transfers... but it doesn't suck nearly as much as the others.)
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I posted this in another reply. "touch" works, yes. Using a makefile to compile something doesn't, much of the time. (It's not 100% failure, but it's not 100% success, either.) I experienced this bug just last week while compiling GD for use with a PHP project I was working on. Apple may claim it's fixed, but it's not.
Ummm, have you used OS9, lately?
Yeah. I had to use it on a borrowed iBook a few months ago to get back some data that OS X deleted from my text clippings.
I thought they looked cool at first, and then I tried them, and oh man. They go completely counter to Apple's basic design philosophy, they make for a lot of useless clutter, and there's no precident on how they should be used efficiently. I'm glad they got rid of those, very glad.
So because you personally couldn't figure out how to use them efficiently, they should be removed? I didn't realize you were king of the universe.
If you care, I found a way to use them efficiently and it took me ages to get used to working without them again. For me, tabbed folders was one of those features like Expose where once you get used to it, you keep looking for it on other computers and sigh in disappointment when you realize it doesn't work on all computers. It just became part of my workflow, and I was never more productive.
I'm not so much an egotist to say that any feature I can't figure out how to use efficiently should be removed. (I've never figured out Labels, for instance.) But I think it's reasonable to expect version 10 of a product to have feature parity with version 9 of the same product.
Open in New Window - I railed on Microsoft when they first came up with the "open in exiting window" idea, but ya know what? I've gotta hand it to them (yes, I know, this was originally implemented in some Linux builds, but I hadn't used any yet), they were right to have done so.
I have no problem whatsoever with Apple *adding* this feature. My issue is that in the process, they completely screwed up the spatial window management we had before and haven't ever fixed it. If you like browser-style file management, then great! But the users who like spatial file management are up a creek with no paddles to be found.
Bottom line, Classic was good for its day, but and OSX finder definitely has room for improvement, but saying that OS9s Finder was better than OSX is just kidding yourself
I was much more productive with Classic's Finder than I've ever been with OS X's. In the end, that's all that matters to me.
No problems with thumbnails here, and I go through a LOT of them. For... research purposes, yeah. Even partial or corrupt ones have no effect (although until 10.4, they could crash the Finder, so this may be old information). Windows is snappier because it caches the thumbnails, and can end up with them being out of date.
.5 seconds the Dock makes you wait before it opens the folder up.
It may be old information. Frankly, I don't sort large folders of images in OS X anymore because I've had such horrible experiences with it in the past.
And Windows is snappier even when you don't consider caching. Windows is snappier generating them in the first place over a fileshare from my Mac... it's frequently finished before OS X is, even when OS X has a head start. And unless Windows is psychic, there's no way it could have seen those images before the network connection was made.
Thumbs.db, anyone?
Huh? What does this mean?
Tabbed folders - missed them for about 5 minutes, then discovered the Dock. Could you dig down through multiple levels of folders with a click like you can with the Dock? No. And with Leopard, they're spring loaded finally.
No, but you could easily do that in the Apple menu since Mac OS 7, so it's not like the Dock is giving you something revolutionarily new.
I used the tabbed folders as drag&drop targets, so I have all my handy apps ready to drag stuff too. You could pop up one folder containing documents, drag the file to another folder containing apps, drop it on the target, and poof all the folders neatly file themselves away and you have your document ready to go. Plus the tabs never got covered up by apps, so they were always handy to use. And you didn't have to wait the
Whether or not you personally found them useful, you had to admit that it's pretty fishy for version 10 of a product to have far fewer features than version 9 of the same product. Apple should have at least gotten back to feature parity before adding things like 'Smart Folsders'. Which, while fancy, I find a lot less useful than tabbed folders were.
Clipping support. Yes, they were useful, but this is the best you've got?
Did you not read it? Deleting my list of passwords? Silently, without even giving me the courtesy of an error message? You seriously find this acceptable behavior? (Thankfully, I had a backup, but it was a huge pain trying to get those clippings copied into something OS X likes. I had to use Classic mode on a borrowed laptop.)
I know OS X can read resource forks. There's absolutely no excuse for Finder not automatically converting the old-style text clippings into the new-style ones.
And of course, you can't do as much with the new ones as you could with the old, so it's another case of version 10 of the product having fewer features than version 9.
You most certainly do NOT have to "prod" the Finder to show new files. Kernel file notifications were added in 10.4 and work fine. Go ahead, open a window then "touch foo" in the terminal - the file will appear as soon as you hit enter.
"touch" works, yes. I think that's as far as Apple actually tested it.
When a makefile creates files while building a downloaded package, they often don't show up. Same with un-gzipping files. And some other operations. I concede that it works in more cases in 10.4 than it did in previous cases, but it still doesn't work 100% of the time like any modern file browser should. (Note: I experienced this just last week while compiling the GD library for use with PHP.)
Otherwise, it's just fine. Despite the whining, it has made a lot of progress since 10.0.
And despite the progress, it still doesn't work as well as the Finder that came with OS 9 did. Seriously.
Look, I love Apple products, and I'm not saying Finder is a bad program. What I'm saying is that it's the worst program Apple ships. Given Apple's high level of quality, it's still pretty good.
The Dock is managed by a process named (for some strange reason ;) "Dock." Open up Activity Monitor and you can see it listed.
Finder is the name of Mac OS's file browser. It's roughly equivalent to Explorer.exe on Windows, except Explorer manages both the taskbar and the file browser, and Finder only manages the file browsing. Like Explorer, it's a pretty essential part of the OS... it's the first thing everybody sees when they log in, it manages filesharing connections, disk mounting and unmounting, and various other things (like DotMac syncing.) I think it also controls logging in and out, but I may be wrong there.
Maybe I'm just an old dog who's no good and new tricks, but I hate the "browser"-type stuff. I want a 100% fully spatial Finder, like we had in every single version of Mac OS until 10. It wasn't broken, and it shouldn't have been "fixed."
If they wanted to add a browser mode in addition to the normal Finder mode, that would be fine with me-- as long as they didn't break the normal Finder mode in the process.
Sorry, I'm new to mac .... what is so crummy about the Finder in Tiger? I've had some difficulties using it, but always penned it as user error. What was good about previous implementations?
It has terrible usability design, with two "modes" (a Windows-esque 'browser' mode, and a Mac Classic 'spatial' mode), neither of which work correctly. The Spotlight UI, in particular, is almost criminally complex and quirky... a Linux/Windows user might not notice it, but to a Mac Classic user it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. People used to Classic are driven spare by the Command-N keyboard shortcut that used to create a new folder, but now creates a new window-- even in Spatial mode (which makes no sense.)
If you have make the horrible error of trying to open a network drive when the network it's on is no longer available (you know, like the huge number of people who use wifi on their laptops), Finder will freeze for minutes at a time. Finder will also freeze for several minutes if you have the audacity to drag-and-drop files to the desktop from some applications. DotMac will also freeze Finder for several minutes if it attempts to sync itself while on an un-reliable network. There's no multi-threading whatsoever.
Opening a window with a large number of images will frequently crash Finder as it creates thumbnails. And no, it's not a corrupt image file, because if I do the same view in Windows, Windows will create the thumbnails in seconds with no errors. When Finder's image previews do work, generating them is super-slow.
It's still missing features that were in Mac Classic, like tabbed folders. (Although to be fair, they have added Labels back in and Pop-Open drag&drop.) Text clippings are nearly useless, as you can no longer drag them directly into a word processor/edit field (like in OS 9), nor can you select and Copy text from them. Oh, and Finder will silently delete the contents of old Mac Classic text clippings, so I hope you didn't have a bunch of important passwords in one or anything... oops!
If you create a new file on the CLI, it still won't show up right away in Finder. You frequently have to 'prod' Finder into showing it, by closing and re-opening the window, or creating a new folder and then deleting it.
It's just bad. Given, a bad Macintosh file browser is still as good as the average Linux or Windows file browser, but that's not much of an excuse, especially for us old-school Mac users. I'd be happy if they fixed some of the more blatant bugs and added tabbed folders, even if it's not a total re-write.
They've gone, what, 5 releases without fixing (much) in Finder; what makes you think they'll fix it this time around? Wasn't it 10.3 where Apple claimed they were re-writing Finder from scratch, and we ended up with almost the exact same mess of poor usability and terrible bugs we were using before? Hell, I'd be happy if it just didn't utterly freeze for minutes at a time when your network got disconnected-- it's like the Finder programmers never heard of wifi!
It's sad when the one application that is hard-coded to run on every boot for every user is the worst application Apple makes.
It certainly doesn't help that, in this case, the standards absolutely suck. It's hard to convince anybody to use standards when the 'standard' version of the page doesn't let you do simple things you want to do without tons of workarounds and nasty hacks. Like center an image vertically. Or anything related to AJAX.
I've love to be able to do simple math in CSS. I should be able to set an attribute to 1em + 5px, but right now you can't. Your idea about giving CSS references to attributes that you could refer back to in other attributes is good, also.
HTML/Javascript is such a mess now anyway, one more standard can't possibly make anything worse.
Oh please. Everybody on the Internet always complains that everything is too expensive. It gets old. The company pricing the product knows a heck of a lot more about the market and their customers than random Internet users, and I can guarantee that these "almost outrageously expensive" prices will also be almost outrageously popular.
The true measure of whether something is too expensive is whether people buy it. If customers are buying it, then it's not too expensive.
While I generally agree with you, at least the low-end Xbox 360 was upgradeable to be identical to a high-end one at a fairly reasonable price. That's not true of the PS3, and I think that's the real problem Sony faces... if their low-end was upgradeable to a high-end, it probably would be much more popular.
In theory it is. But if that's all it takes to be a big deal, I can point the press to hundreds of MUDs and MUSHes that have been doing the same thing for decades.
In reality, it's crummy software populated primarily with pedophiles and furry fetishists. Most of those MUDs and MUSHes aren't.
Considering the amount of staff they've hired recently in Kirkland, WA, and the fact that we have a huge and healthy tech industry I'd expect a Seattle (or western-Washington) event. Very disappointing.
Everyone know Microsoft can't get anything right until the third attempt. This is only the second.
Microsoft's hardware has always been spot-on. I love their home networking routers and wireless cards, and I'm kind of upset they stopped making them. (My 802.11g router from Microsoft has been by far the most reliable home networking device I've ever owned.) Same with their keyboards and mouses. And the Xbox.
Also, their Office products for Mac were pretty damn good even in the first incarnation in the mid-80s, at least as good as the OS and technology of the time would allow.
Also, it's "everyone knows". If you're going to throw out unfounded flamebait statements, at least use better grammar.
I was gonna comment on it. But after reading Slashdot for awhile, you kind of get numb to the moronic psuedo-English that shows up in almost every story. Plus I couldn't think of a really good punchline.
Dude, we have Big Bumpin' at our workplace and it's one of the most fun party games on Xbox 360 right now. Seriously. Try it before you knock it.
How much does Nintendo pay you?
People are always accusing me of being hired by Microsoft, but you've certainly mastered the profession.
You mean like this?
No, I mean like "I drag a file into your Jabber IM window and you receive that file." I don't give a crap about experimental this and proposed draft that, I just want something that works and works now. MSN and AIM work now to transfer files, Jabber doesn't.
If you can show me a working Jabber client that does this, I've love to see it. I've never seen one.
I just meant that adium devs don't have many problems using libpurple on OS X, without seeing that you had already mentioned them.
That's even more confusing. What's "libpurple?" When did I mention them?
Nevermind, I give up. As a point of advice, though: MAKE SENSE!
DId you miss the second screenshot where the window was halfway off the screen with no way to move or resize it? It's not like that was a small monitor, it was 1024x768... GAIM didn't even slightly attempt to make the window fit the screen. And I don't have screenshots of the dozen times it crashed. Even if it didn't look like cat barf, there's still the HUGE NUMBER OF BUGS keeping me from using it. In fact, I'd prefer the bugs me fixed before the horrible appearance be fixed anyway.
The real problem is that I have a lot of open source-loving friends who always tell me programs like GAIM are the best thing ever and if I don't use them I'm going to hell. Then when I do use them, I get this half-finished ugly, buggy technology that disappoints greatly. Then a couple years later, I get the "oh, it's much better now" spiel and, stupidly, I try it again, and it's still half-finished, ugly and buggy.
Adium, with its current OS X appearance assuming Windows widgets, would actually probably look pretty good in Windows if it was ported. In fact, even if it didn't use Windows widgets, it would look fine in Vista. It's all a pipe-dream, though, since Adium is developed by some of those obnoxious Mac users who refuse to port useful software. See also: TextMate, SubEthaEdit. I hate those people even more than I hate people who tell me to use half-finished open source software.
Yes, yes, Jabber is great and it's XML and it takes out the trash every tuesday morning.
But AIM and MSN transfer files. Jabber doesn't. That's a HUGE oversight that's yet to be fixed. Until Jabber has feature-parity with MSN and AIM (and I don't mean the goofy stuff like' nudges', just the ability to transfer files and in-line images), it'll never really catch on. You're not going to get people to switch from A to B if B doesn't do what A does.
Funny, the Adium developers don't seem to have a particular problem with this. Perhaps nobody told them when they scarted using TLFKA libgaim?
Particular problem with what, exactly? What is TLFKA? What on earth are you replying to?
AIM is the only one of those non-standardized protocols that can consistently transfer files from one computer to another. Until at least one of the other ones can, I'd like it to stick around.
It couldn't be any worse than the current version: ugly and buggy.
I'd give my right ankle for a port of Adium to Windows, or any other platform than OS X for that matter. It's the only multi-protocol IM client that doesn't suck. (Well, it still sucks for file transfers... but it doesn't suck nearly as much as the others.)