8 ms·

Adium Redesigned

168 points by pchm 13y ago

DelvarWorld 13y ago
Dear adium: Please don't implement this :) We like you just the way you are.
mnicole 13y ago
Personally I think Adium needs a lot of work, both in UI and functionality. I've used it for a long time, but I'm not particularly happy with it without going out of my way to extend it with add-ons, especially when it comes to IRC. Would love to help on a project like this where I could (design, etc).
aw3c2 13y ago
That layout will fail if both sides write many short single line posts. You will have to alternate between both sides of the screen all the time and might lose the line on the way. I never got the appeal of the "left and right" movement. I much prefer messages being shown top to bottom without me having to look left and right. I am not updating my SMS app because they switched to that layout and I found it annoying to use. I also find a timestamp on each message useful, much more than whitespace or bubbles.
untog 13y ago
Adium has pretty extensive skinning options- I wonder whether you wouldn't even need to rewrite.
- orta 13y ago
  It would have to be quite a serious fork, adium as it is has quite a lot of Mac-isms. Starting with it being at core a mutli-window application. I'd be interested to see where this goes, and have set myself a reminder in three months to see if there's been any development on it, as it's an interesting project.
  - psychometry 13y ago
    Adium is one of the rare apps where it makes sense for it to be multi-window. You might want certain chats on certain spaces only, while having a separate contact list window that hides at one edge of the screen.
    - pavel_lishin 13y ago
      I 100% want different chat windows in different locations on my monitor. Work chat goes on the right, personal chat goes on the left. I do NOT want to accidentally tell my boss I can't wait to grope him tonight because I clicked on a window and started typing without checking I had the right person selected.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
"Adium Reskinned" is more appropriate. This is a mockup that some designer did that fused (the bad parts of) Messages with the background color on this blog and then posted it on HN. Maybe the designers should learn how to skin Adium and do this? I fail to see why they can't?
- joshstrange 13y ago
  There is a limit to what you can skin in Adium and some of those things you just can't change so even if you make the messages view look beautiful the tabs for each conversation are un-theme-able.
  - ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
    Nevertheless the UI skinning can be mostly done. I see no reason why the designers couldn't be doing this themselves.
ulfw 13y ago
I was an Adium user for many years but frankly I very much disagree with Messages being bugridden, while assuming Adium is not. In fact Adium took so much work in trying to update it, logging me out randomly of AOL (and then telling me I am logged in on two devices), not showing things on MSN, not transferring images properly etc.
- nwh 13y ago
  > I very much disagree with Messages being bugridden • Using search hangs/crashes the client • Having the client open for more than a few hours will use many gigabytes of memory (I'm at 2.5GB right now) • Messages aren't in chronological order • Messages randomly shuffle depending on network conditions (this is the biggest issue) • Messages randomly don't appear, appear late, or spam notifications on arrival • "Deleted" messages aren't, so the /Library/Messages/ folder fills with junk over time • The dock badge will sometimes be wrong, displaying a number when it shouldn't, or even showing negative unread messages • You can render anybodies Messages.app useless with a bunch of unicode messages. They have to delete their databases and start over. It's literally the worst application I've used, and you're the first person I've encountered that doesn't feel the same way.
  - Jeraimee 13y ago
    The only issue in the list above that I have experienced is the poor Library/Messages folder usage and that doesn't bother me at all. I use Messages for everything and no longer use any other IM client - however - if Adium supported iMessage I'd totally go running back to the duck.
    - nwh 13y ago
      I think that might be where the difference is, it's the iMessage service simplimentation itself that is nasty — I've never used Messages.app to connect to AIM or Jabber.
  - bsg75 13y ago
    So I decide to try Adium again after reading this thread, and quit Messages: panic(cpu 1 caller 0xffffff800d2a2a6a): ... BSD process name corresponding to current thread: Messages
knodi 13y ago
I think he means "Messages" UI with different colors.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rinon 13y ago
Perhaps this is just me (design tends to be a pretty subjective thing), but I fail to see why it looks terrible. Multi-window makes sense for a small chat window on top of other applications. While the chat window itself could use a little work, not everyone (myself included) likes the iMessage word bubbles. However, making this look pretty should simply be a skin for Adium.
- AdrianRossouw 13y ago
  the silly chat bubbles is the primary reason i never liked ichat or messages, or the sms handling of iphones. i was raised on IRC though, so ymmv.
emehrkay 13y ago
I like it: http://elpassion.pl/adium-concept/adium.html http://elpassion.pl/adium-concept/adium.html (nice demo site too)
- BaconJuice 13y ago
  how was the demo site done? are they using some sort of framework for the showcase?
  - grogblob 13y ago
    Looks like he used Adobe Edge.
sagan 13y ago
I'd say my no longer using Adium is less about its appearance and more about the fact that it doesn't support iMessage.
- nov503 13y ago
  Agree, so does Android
- eropple 13y ago
  Messages (barely) supports iMessage, to the point where I use it to talk to two people and only because they're not reachable otherwise. Big fan of how Messages decides to lose history seemingly at random and only display fragments of previous conversations. Bigger fan of how the conversations it decides to show at the bottom of the log are from weeks prior. I use Adium for everything else because I know it works.
potatolicious 13y ago
The drag-and-drop file sharing, with inline preview, is pretty amazing. I wish Adium had that. I really dislike the rest of the UI though. One very important thing about Adium is how compact it is. Even on relatively small laptop screens you can just leave it in a corner, which makes it easy to hold conversations without having to break context. The conversation list, and the conversation views themselves, feel very much like the much-maligned "gigantor" Skype update from a while back. Everything feels much too big, much too spaced out, for a pure utility app. IM isn't an "experience" app, it's about as utilitarian as computer use gets. The "smart command line" thing is very cool though.
- mimiflynn 13y ago
  The compactness of Adium is key. I always set it up to have my friend list as a translucent border free floating window to where it is unobtrusively sticking to the top right hand corner of my screen. I enjoy only seeing tabs of people I am currently chatting with; the list to the left on these screens is too bulky.
- baby 13y ago
  > The conversation list, and the conversation views themselves, feel very much like the much-maligned "gigantor" Skype update from a while back. mixed with facebook message since you can view a preview of the messages as well. I think this is how Skype should have done it.
- ChiperSoft 13y ago
  Exactly, this doesn't look like Adium, it looks like a flat version if Apple Messages.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
Looking again, I'm even more flabbergasted that this is getting any play. The UX is terrible. * It copies the conversation mode in Messages...a terrible feature that ruins the convenience of keeping open only the contacts you want to keep open. Its still multi-window...unless you plan on making me search for contacts. Because typing when your hand is on the mouse is convenient. Nice that I have to click on a contact and bring up their chat window to see their status. I'm irritated because there is nothing innovative or informative about this post.
bradgessler 13y ago
Wow, why is there such an unbelievable amount of negativity and trolling about this project? I applaud what Oskar and Dawid are trying to do. Adium is a great project, but its starting to feel a little stale and could use some people experimenting with different UI. I hope Dawid and Oskar find somebody to help them with this experiment and I hope encouragement and constructive feedback start float to the top of this thread. Lets help these guys get help and see what happens!
- jlarocco 13y ago
  Probably for the same reason developers are negative about people coming up and saying, "Hey, I have a great idea for an app/website/..." They want to fork the project and build a new UI? Cool. Go do it. If people like their changes they'll start using their version of Adium, and other people will contribute to their project.
  - bluthru 13y ago
    >"Hey, I have a great idea for an app/website/..." It's not just an idea. It's a considered UI for the community to critique and possibly implement. An open source project thrives on multiple people to help out. If this mockup was so simple and obvious, it would have existed already.
    - ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
      Unless I can print this out and rub it on my screen to create the code and associated elements needed to make this work, I don't see how this is anything other than a mockup...which is an idea.
      - bluthru 13y ago
        That's like saying floor plans or a logo is just an idea.
        ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
mey 13y ago
Does no one on Mac use Trillian?
- shalmanese 13y ago
  I use it because I loved Trillian on Windows but Trillian on mac is still a buggy, alpha product. One thing that's incredibly hard to get right with modern IM is intelligent multi-device routing. It's incredibly frustrating to have your phone buzzing next to you as you're having a conversation on your PC. Using Trillian on all my devices prevents that and that's reason enough since Adium doesn't have a iPhone app.
- chadcf 13y ago
  The mac trillian is pretty ugly and history browsing is terrible, but I use it. I use it for one single reason: it's the only chat client I've found that can sync between multiple devices. I fire it up on my mac and on my android phone, and not only does it give me the same chats on both, but it's also really good at figuring at which device I'm at and sending notifications there (for example, if I'm working at my desk it does not notify me of new chats on the phone, only on the desktop). To me this is the killer feature. I would, however, switch in a heartbeat if there was a more featured and attractive app that could do this.
- egypturnash 13y ago
  I've been using a Mac since OS9 and I didn't even know there was a Mac version of Trillian. I thought it was a Windows-only client.
mjt0229 13y ago
Please make it happen. Also, please let me hide "buddies" that are in my Google contacts, whose activity I do not want to see but whose contact info I do not want to lose.
slajax 13y ago
This seems like adium reborn as skype to me. I've never understood why the current design trends intend to make larger more robust interfaces to simplistic programs like chat. My ideal chat is something like irssi. It takes up minimal screen real estate, which is priority #1 for me.
msutherl 13y ago
Evidently, the UI concept should support both single and multiple window usage patterns.
zacharyvoase 13y ago
I'd suggest implementing this as its own app—Adium, Pidgin etc. are just front-ends to libpurple, and this could probably be implemented as such, too.
state 13y ago
I've seen a few of these unsolicited redesigns pass through HN, and design specifics aside I like the tone of this post a lot. Who knows how this is going to pan out, but it's a good place to start. Yes. Go forth. Fork.
ebbv 13y ago
I am kinda sick of titles that suggest someone has actually done something more than just create mockups, when really it's just some mockups. We can all make some mockups in an afternoon. It's not really worth telling everybody about unless you've done something, IMHO.
- ender7 13y ago
  Making mocks is doing something. I don't think it's healthy for programmers to discount the efforts of designers or vice-versa. Now, it's easy to make mocks that gloss over the real challenges or nasty corner cases, but it's also easy to write garbage code that will never be useful to anyone. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people out there with lots of engineering ability and not much design ability who might jump at the chance of implementing something that's been thoroughly mocked and product-ed out.
  - ebbv 13y ago
    I don't discount the work designers do, but making mockups is only the start of a designer's job, IMHO. It's like a programmer saying "Job's done" because they made a DB schema.
- acous 13y ago
  Designers depend on programmers to take it from mockup to prototype. How can that be done if nobody knows about it? You are saying that a mockup is basically nothing, that anyone can do it. If that's true, why do we need designers at all?
  - jlarocco 13y ago
    This is going to be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I would say the need for designers is hugely overblown. Most of the time the only people I hear complaining about UI design are UI designers. Except for exceptionally bad cases, most people don't care too much what their applications look like. And most people would rather have a working implementation with an ugly UI than a pretty picture/mockup that doesn't do anything.
205guy 13y ago
Ob-title-gripe: shouldn't it be "Adium Reconceived"? I expect to see the result in about 9 months.
mratzloff 13y ago
Uncharitable summary: "We did a mockup that merged the designs for Messages and Skype, and we want that interface for Adium. Someone please implement it for us."
- phene 13y ago
  Seriously, the merging of the contacts list and the chat window is one of the things I hate most about the new Skype UI.
northisup 13y ago
Looks awesome! But not not actually reborn, more of just a concept of how to make it a lot better. Can we, as a community, stop saying "LOOK I MADE SOMETHING" when it is actually just a landing page or mock up?
iSnow 13y ago
Man, that is an example of graceful degradation, just not what we usually understand this to mean. - Bubbles. Seriously? The 2005's want their failed metaphors back. Thanks, the list-and-icons Adium presents are way more useful - stamp-sized images to disturb the text flow. Great idea, please forget about it right now. Adium is completely unsexy, and this is a good thing. I don't need a chat application to take over my whole screen, this is not Facebook Home. Next up: Terminal.app reborn: output of Unix commands grouped by "conversation" - because is looks so much nicer. Icons for every shell command - much sexier looking.
- mcrittenden 13y ago
  Your Terminal.app reborn example sort of reminds me of https://github.com/unconed/TermKit https://github.com/unconed/TermKit
  - iSnow 13y ago
    Thanks, I need a Whiskey now ;)
- mynameisvlad 13y ago
  Everyone is not you. Some people like to have a chat application take up the whole screen. And chat bubbles are alive and well, for example in Apple's own Messages.app
  - workbench 13y ago
    I refuse to believe there is a single person on earth who actually likes the OS X Messages.app
    - lightgreen 13y ago
      I switched from Adium to Messages because I haven't found a way to turn off annoying dock animation of Adium when Internet is offline or when jabber server is down. Later I found that Messages' proprietary protocol that synchronizes chats on Mac and iPhone is very convenient, and most of my contacts have iPhones or Macs. So today I almost don't use jabber. Sad but true.
rjd 13y ago
I for one totally hate the layout of iMessage, and skype ... which this seems to be a clone of. I always find myself with both iMessage and Skype having to always check I'm in the correct chat window, this layout to me doesn't automatically say "Hey you're talking to Mike", I have to stop and visually verify each time. Looking at his design, with almost zero contrast, it would be orders of magnitude worse trying to work out which person you chatting to at a glance. I would honesty stop using adium if this become the default UI.
mvkel 13y ago
Mockups are just an abstraction of the real thing. There are lots of issues with this mockup that wouldn't translate well when it gets built. Example: the search "box" running directly into the pill buttons. It's a decent mashup of Messages UI with Adium functionality, but that doesn't necessarily make it better.
- supercoder 13y ago
  What is the issue with the search / pill ? It can be done..
tjholowaychuk 13y ago
looks 10 million times better, nice work
BeBouR 13y ago
Hey, I like that, seems pretty... clean. I would totally use that if someone made it :)
caycep 13y ago
what's buggy about iMessage? I haven't had too much trouble with it, at least for SMS and gchat. Then again, I usually use Adium on account of IRC so maybe I just haven't used iMessage enough to run into anything.
- BaconJuice 13y ago
  I think he means iChat
CapnGoat 13y ago
I made a ticket [1] about exactly that with a mockup (which I seem to have deleted from my droplr over that time; though it looked very similar to how iMessages looks now) 2 years ago and the response to the idea was a "no". You should make a ticket yourselves and see if they've changed their minds yet. I'd love to see a single window UI in Adium but just making the mockup and saying how good of an idea it is doesn't seem to be convincing enough for someone to actually tackle the project. [1] https://trac.adium.im/ticket/14843 https://trac.adium.im/ticket/14843
BaconJuice 13y ago
how was the demo site done? are they using some sort of framework for the showcase?
mikeleeorg 13y ago
There aren't enough designers in the open source community, so I love seeing this effort. If someone implements this, perhaps it will encourage other designers to offer suggested UIs to other open source projects (some of which could really use some UI love).
- Skoofoo 13y ago
  This would benefit the open source community a whole lot more if it weren't made for a proprietary OS.
mmuro 13y ago
I switched from Adium to Messages back when the beta was released and haven't looked back.
FuzzyDunlop 13y ago
The best thing about Adium is that every conversation can occupy its own little window, taking full advantage of OSX's window system. If you need to chat, the window for that specific conversation is right there to look at. Use exposé and you see all the chats at once. Never do you have to open the monolithic Adium app, then click to the conversation that exists in a different 'folder'(since they use the same concept of Finder's sidebar). I immensely dislike the concept of single window apps in OSX just because you can't dismiss the parts of the app you really don't care about. You can't see more than one portion of it at once, and you can't organise it on your very spacious desktop.
austingunter 13y ago
Please do.
baby 13y ago
Adium and Transmission are the only two software that I really miss from OSX. I wish someone would make an equivalent on Windows.
- workbench 13y ago
  Adium, Transmission, Textmate and Transmit are easily my faves. Main reasons I stick with OS X, despite disliking the direction Apple is taking it.
cswelin 13y ago
I'm curious, I know Adium uses a webview to implement their chat window. How would one do this without a webview? that reacts the same (text selection only)? does Messages use a webview as well?
r00fus 13y ago
No mention about Skype? I'm stuck on this due to business associates and customers demanding it for the past 5 years. Everything else is Messages.
phil 13y ago
That's a really nice mock. I started prototyping something along these lines a couple months before Messages was announced. The idea was to make a (commercial) next-generation IM client for the Mac with a more modern UI. I stopped working on it when the first Messages beta was released, figuring that it added most of the UI things I wanted, and that if it shipped with OS X for free, few would want an alternative. Now I wonder if dissatisfaction with Messages is high enough that there's an opportunity again? If you're interested in this stuff and want to talk about it, drop me an email.
pootch 13y ago
Can the redesign include "working" this time? Most broken thing I ever tried to use.
mahgnous 13y ago
I don't like the mockup UI he's got on that page. Copied way too much from iMessage which I hate.
jorisw 13y ago
Perfect. Love it.
FWeinb 13y ago
I made a HTML/CSS3 version out of it: http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/iwIBK http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/iwIBK

168 points by pchm 13y ago

Dear adium: Please don't implement this :) We like you just the way you are.

Personally I think Adium needs a lot of work, both in UI and functionality. I've used it for a long time, but I'm not particularly happy with it without going out of my way to extend it with add-ons, especially when it comes to IRC. Would love to help on a project like this where I could (design, etc).

aw3c2 13y ago

That layout will fail if both sides write many short single line posts. You will have to alternate between both sides of the screen all the time and might lose the line on the way. I never got the appeal of the "left and right" movement. I much prefer messages being shown top to bottom without me having to look left and right. I am not updating my SMS app because they switched to that layout and I found it annoying to use. I also find a timestamp on each message useful, much more than whitespace or bubbles.

untog 13y ago

Adium has pretty extensive skinning options- I wonder whether you wouldn't even need to rewrite.

orta 13y ago
It would have to be quite a serious fork, adium as it is has quite a lot of Mac-isms. Starting with it being at core a mutli-window application. I'd be interested to see where this goes, and have set myself a reminder in three months to see if there's been any development on it, as it's an interesting project.
- psychometry 13y ago
  Adium is one of the rare apps where it makes sense for it to be multi-window. You might want certain chats on certain spaces only, while having a separate contact list window that hides at one edge of the screen.
  - pavel_lishin 13y ago
    I 100% want different chat windows in different locations on my monitor. Work chat goes on the right, personal chat goes on the left. I do NOT want to accidentally tell my boss I can't wait to grope him tonight because I clicked on a window and started typing without checking I had the right person selected.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

"Adium Reskinned" is more appropriate. This is a mockup that some designer did that fused (the bad parts of) Messages with the background color on this blog and then posted it on HN. Maybe the designers should learn how to skin Adium and do this? I fail to see why they can't?

joshstrange 13y ago
There is a limit to what you can skin in Adium and some of those things you just can't change so even if you make the messages view look beautiful the tabs for each conversation are un-theme-able.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
  Nevertheless the UI skinning can be mostly done. I see no reason why the designers couldn't be doing this themselves.

ulfw 13y ago

I was an Adium user for many years but frankly I very much disagree with Messages being bugridden, while assuming Adium is not. In fact Adium took so much work in trying to update it, logging me out randomly of AOL (and then telling me I am logged in on two devices), not showing things on MSN, not transferring images properly etc.

nwh 13y ago
> I very much disagree with Messages being bugridden • Using search hangs/crashes the client • Having the client open for more than a few hours will use many gigabytes of memory (I'm at 2.5GB right now) • Messages aren't in chronological order • Messages randomly shuffle depending on network conditions (this is the biggest issue) • Messages randomly don't appear, appear late, or spam notifications on arrival • "Deleted" messages aren't, so the /Library/Messages/ folder fills with junk over time • The dock badge will sometimes be wrong, displaying a number when it shouldn't, or even showing negative unread messages • You can render anybodies Messages.app useless with a bunch of unicode messages. They have to delete their databases and start over. It's literally the worst application I've used, and you're the first person I've encountered that doesn't feel the same way.
- Jeraimee 13y ago
  The only issue in the list above that I have experienced is the poor Library/Messages folder usage and that doesn't bother me at all. I use Messages for everything and no longer use any other IM client - however - if Adium supported iMessage I'd totally go running back to the duck.
  - nwh 13y ago
    I think that might be where the difference is, it's the iMessage service simplimentation itself that is nasty — I've never used Messages.app to connect to AIM or Jabber.
- bsg75 13y ago
  So I decide to try Adium again after reading this thread, and quit Messages: panic(cpu 1 caller 0xffffff800d2a2a6a): ... BSD process name corresponding to current thread: Messages

knodi 13y ago

I think he means "Messages" UI with different colors.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rinon 13y ago

Perhaps this is just me (design tends to be a pretty subjective thing), but I fail to see why it looks terrible. Multi-window makes sense for a small chat window on top of other applications. While the chat window itself could use a little work, not everyone (myself included) likes the iMessage word bubbles. However, making this look pretty should simply be a skin for Adium.

AdrianRossouw 13y ago
the silly chat bubbles is the primary reason i never liked ichat or messages, or the sms handling of iphones. i was raised on IRC though, so ymmv.

emehrkay 13y ago

I like it: http://elpassion.pl/adium-concept/adium.html http://elpassion.pl/adium-concept/adium.html (nice demo site too)

BaconJuice 13y ago
how was the demo site done? are they using some sort of framework for the showcase?
- grogblob 13y ago
  Looks like he used Adobe Edge.

sagan 13y ago

I'd say my no longer using Adium is less about its appearance and more about the fact that it doesn't support iMessage.

nov503 13y ago
Agree, so does Android
eropple 13y ago
Messages (barely) supports iMessage, to the point where I use it to talk to two people and only because they're not reachable otherwise. Big fan of how Messages decides to lose history seemingly at random and only display fragments of previous conversations. Bigger fan of how the conversations it decides to show at the bottom of the log are from weeks prior. I use Adium for everything else because I know it works.

potatolicious 13y ago

The drag-and-drop file sharing, with inline preview, is pretty amazing. I wish Adium had that. I really dislike the rest of the UI though. One very important thing about Adium is how compact it is. Even on relatively small laptop screens you can just leave it in a corner, which makes it easy to hold conversations without having to break context. The conversation list, and the conversation views themselves, feel very much like the much-maligned "gigantor" Skype update from a while back. Everything feels much too big, much too spaced out, for a pure utility app. IM isn't an "experience" app, it's about as utilitarian as computer use gets. The "smart command line" thing is very cool though.

mimiflynn 13y ago
The compactness of Adium is key. I always set it up to have my friend list as a translucent border free floating window to where it is unobtrusively sticking to the top right hand corner of my screen. I enjoy only seeing tabs of people I am currently chatting with; the list to the left on these screens is too bulky.
baby 13y ago
> The conversation list, and the conversation views themselves, feel very much like the much-maligned "gigantor" Skype update from a while back. mixed with facebook message since you can view a preview of the messages as well. I think this is how Skype should have done it.
ChiperSoft 13y ago
Exactly, this doesn't look like Adium, it looks like a flat version if Apple Messages.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

Looking again, I'm even more flabbergasted that this is getting any play. The UX is terrible. * It copies the conversation mode in Messages...a terrible feature that ruins the convenience of keeping open only the contacts you want to keep open. Its still multi-window...unless you plan on making me search for contacts. Because typing when your hand is on the mouse is convenient. Nice that I have to click on a contact and bring up their chat window to see their status. I'm irritated because there is nothing innovative or informative about this post.

bradgessler 13y ago

Wow, why is there such an unbelievable amount of negativity and trolling about this project? I applaud what Oskar and Dawid are trying to do. Adium is a great project, but its starting to feel a little stale and could use some people experimenting with different UI. I hope Dawid and Oskar find somebody to help them with this experiment and I hope encouragement and constructive feedback start float to the top of this thread. Lets help these guys get help and see what happens!

jlarocco 13y ago
Probably for the same reason developers are negative about people coming up and saying, "Hey, I have a great idea for an app/website/..." They want to fork the project and build a new UI? Cool. Go do it. If people like their changes they'll start using their version of Adium, and other people will contribute to their project.
- bluthru 13y ago
  >"Hey, I have a great idea for an app/website/..." It's not just an idea. It's a considered UI for the community to critique and possibly implement. An open source project thrives on multiple people to help out. If this mockup was so simple and obvious, it would have existed already.
  - ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
    Unless I can print this out and rub it on my screen to create the code and associated elements needed to make this work, I don't see how this is anything other than a mockup...which is an idea.
    - bluthru 13y ago
      That's like saying floor plans or a logo is just an idea.
      - ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

mey 13y ago

Does no one on Mac use Trillian?

shalmanese 13y ago
I use it because I loved Trillian on Windows but Trillian on mac is still a buggy, alpha product. One thing that's incredibly hard to get right with modern IM is intelligent multi-device routing. It's incredibly frustrating to have your phone buzzing next to you as you're having a conversation on your PC. Using Trillian on all my devices prevents that and that's reason enough since Adium doesn't have a iPhone app.
chadcf 13y ago
The mac trillian is pretty ugly and history browsing is terrible, but I use it. I use it for one single reason: it's the only chat client I've found that can sync between multiple devices. I fire it up on my mac and on my android phone, and not only does it give me the same chats on both, but it's also really good at figuring at which device I'm at and sending notifications there (for example, if I'm working at my desk it does not notify me of new chats on the phone, only on the desktop). To me this is the killer feature. I would, however, switch in a heartbeat if there was a more featured and attractive app that could do this.
egypturnash 13y ago
I've been using a Mac since OS9 and I didn't even know there was a Mac version of Trillian. I thought it was a Windows-only client.

mjt0229 13y ago

Please make it happen. Also, please let me hide "buddies" that are in my Google contacts, whose activity I do not want to see but whose contact info I do not want to lose.

slajax 13y ago

This seems like adium reborn as skype to me. I've never understood why the current design trends intend to make larger more robust interfaces to simplistic programs like chat. My ideal chat is something like irssi. It takes up minimal screen real estate, which is priority #1 for me.

msutherl 13y ago

Evidently, the UI concept should support both single and multiple window usage patterns.

zacharyvoase 13y ago

I'd suggest implementing this as its own app—Adium, Pidgin etc. are just front-ends to libpurple, and this could probably be implemented as such, too.

state 13y ago

I've seen a few of these unsolicited redesigns pass through HN, and design specifics aside I like the tone of this post a lot. Who knows how this is going to pan out, but it's a good place to start. Yes. Go forth. Fork.

ebbv 13y ago

I am kinda sick of titles that suggest someone has actually done something more than just create mockups, when really it's just some mockups. We can all make some mockups in an afternoon. It's not really worth telling everybody about unless you've done something, IMHO.

ender7 13y ago
Making mocks is doing something. I don't think it's healthy for programmers to discount the efforts of designers or vice-versa. Now, it's easy to make mocks that gloss over the real challenges or nasty corner cases, but it's also easy to write garbage code that will never be useful to anyone. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people out there with lots of engineering ability and not much design ability who might jump at the chance of implementing something that's been thoroughly mocked and product-ed out.
- ebbv 13y ago
  I don't discount the work designers do, but making mockups is only the start of a designer's job, IMHO. It's like a programmer saying "Job's done" because they made a DB schema.
acous 13y ago
Designers depend on programmers to take it from mockup to prototype. How can that be done if nobody knows about it? You are saying that a mockup is basically nothing, that anyone can do it. If that's true, why do we need designers at all?
- jlarocco 13y ago
  This is going to be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I would say the need for designers is hugely overblown. Most of the time the only people I hear complaining about UI design are UI designers. Except for exceptionally bad cases, most people don't care too much what their applications look like. And most people would rather have a working implementation with an ugly UI than a pretty picture/mockup that doesn't do anything.

205guy 13y ago

Ob-title-gripe: shouldn't it be "Adium Reconceived"? I expect to see the result in about 9 months.

mratzloff 13y ago

Uncharitable summary: "We did a mockup that merged the designs for Messages and Skype, and we want that interface for Adium. Someone please implement it for us."

phene 13y ago
Seriously, the merging of the contacts list and the chat window is one of the things I hate most about the new Skype UI.

northisup 13y ago

Looks awesome! But not not actually reborn, more of just a concept of how to make it a lot better. Can we, as a community, stop saying "LOOK I MADE SOMETHING" when it is actually just a landing page or mock up?

iSnow 13y ago

Man, that is an example of graceful degradation, just not what we usually understand this to mean. - Bubbles. Seriously? The 2005's want their failed metaphors back. Thanks, the list-and-icons Adium presents are way more useful - stamp-sized images to disturb the text flow. Great idea, please forget about it right now. Adium is completely unsexy, and this is a good thing. I don't need a chat application to take over my whole screen, this is not Facebook Home. Next up: Terminal.app reborn: output of Unix commands grouped by "conversation" - because is looks so much nicer. Icons for every shell command - much sexier looking.

mcrittenden 13y ago
Your Terminal.app reborn example sort of reminds me of https://github.com/unconed/TermKit https://github.com/unconed/TermKit
- iSnow 13y ago
  Thanks, I need a Whiskey now ;)
mynameisvlad 13y ago
Everyone is not you. Some people like to have a chat application take up the whole screen. And chat bubbles are alive and well, for example in Apple's own Messages.app
- workbench 13y ago
  I refuse to believe there is a single person on earth who actually likes the OS X Messages.app
  - lightgreen 13y ago
    I switched from Adium to Messages because I haven't found a way to turn off annoying dock animation of Adium when Internet is offline or when jabber server is down. Later I found that Messages' proprietary protocol that synchronizes chats on Mac and iPhone is very convenient, and most of my contacts have iPhones or Macs. So today I almost don't use jabber. Sad but true.

rjd 13y ago

I for one totally hate the layout of iMessage, and skype ... which this seems to be a clone of. I always find myself with both iMessage and Skype having to always check I'm in the correct chat window, this layout to me doesn't automatically say "Hey you're talking to Mike", I have to stop and visually verify each time. Looking at his design, with almost zero contrast, it would be orders of magnitude worse trying to work out which person you chatting to at a glance. I would honesty stop using adium if this become the default UI.

mvkel 13y ago

Mockups are just an abstraction of the real thing. There are lots of issues with this mockup that wouldn't translate well when it gets built. Example: the search "box" running directly into the pill buttons. It's a decent mashup of Messages UI with Adium functionality, but that doesn't necessarily make it better.

supercoder 13y ago
What is the issue with the search / pill ? It can be done..

tjholowaychuk 13y ago

looks 10 million times better, nice work

BeBouR 13y ago

Hey, I like that, seems pretty... clean. I would totally use that if someone made it :)

caycep 13y ago

what's buggy about iMessage? I haven't had too much trouble with it, at least for SMS and gchat. Then again, I usually use Adium on account of IRC so maybe I just haven't used iMessage enough to run into anything.

BaconJuice 13y ago
I think he means iChat

CapnGoat 13y ago

I made a ticket [1] about exactly that with a mockup (which I seem to have deleted from my droplr over that time; though it looked very similar to how iMessages looks now) 2 years ago and the response to the idea was a "no". You should make a ticket yourselves and see if they've changed their minds yet. I'd love to see a single window UI in Adium but just making the mockup and saying how good of an idea it is doesn't seem to be convincing enough for someone to actually tackle the project. [1] https://trac.adium.im/ticket/14843 https://trac.adium.im/ticket/14843

BaconJuice 13y ago

how was the demo site done? are they using some sort of framework for the showcase?

mikeleeorg 13y ago

There aren't enough designers in the open source community, so I love seeing this effort. If someone implements this, perhaps it will encourage other designers to offer suggested UIs to other open source projects (some of which could really use some UI love).

Skoofoo 13y ago
This would benefit the open source community a whole lot more if it weren't made for a proprietary OS.

mmuro 13y ago

I switched from Adium to Messages back when the beta was released and haven't looked back.

FuzzyDunlop 13y ago

The best thing about Adium is that every conversation can occupy its own little window, taking full advantage of OSX's window system. If you need to chat, the window for that specific conversation is right there to look at. Use exposé and you see all the chats at once. Never do you have to open the monolithic Adium app, then click to the conversation that exists in a different 'folder'(since they use the same concept of Finder's sidebar). I immensely dislike the concept of single window apps in OSX just because you can't dismiss the parts of the app you really don't care about. You can't see more than one portion of it at once, and you can't organise it on your very spacious desktop.

austingunter 13y ago

Please do.

baby 13y ago

Adium and Transmission are the only two software that I really miss from OSX. I wish someone would make an equivalent on Windows.

workbench 13y ago
Adium, Transmission, Textmate and Transmit are easily my faves. Main reasons I stick with OS X, despite disliking the direction Apple is taking it.

cswelin 13y ago

I'm curious, I know Adium uses a webview to implement their chat window. How would one do this without a webview? that reacts the same (text selection only)? does Messages use a webview as well?

r00fus 13y ago

No mention about Skype? I'm stuck on this due to business associates and customers demanding it for the past 5 years. Everything else is Messages.

phil 13y ago

That's a really nice mock. I started prototyping something along these lines a couple months before Messages was announced. The idea was to make a (commercial) next-generation IM client for the Mac with a more modern UI. I stopped working on it when the first Messages beta was released, figuring that it added most of the UI things I wanted, and that if it shipped with OS X for free, few would want an alternative. Now I wonder if dissatisfaction with Messages is high enough that there's an opportunity again? If you're interested in this stuff and want to talk about it, drop me an email.

pootch 13y ago

Can the redesign include "working" this time? Most broken thing I ever tried to use.

mahgnous 13y ago

I don't like the mockup UI he's got on that page. Copied way too much from iMessage which I hate.

jorisw 13y ago

Perfect. Love it.

FWeinb 13y ago

I made a HTML/CSS3 version out of it: http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/iwIBK http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/iwIBK