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Looking for very light IM (ICQ) client
skwire:
What do you guys think? Is all this extensive skinning an overkill? Should the IM app really stick with a native appearance?
-apankrat (September 03, 2011, 02:09 AM)
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Regarding my use of Miranda (and almost any other app), I don't use any sort of skinning with it. So, yes, I would say forego any skinning and stay with the system's native appearance.
apankrat:
@lanux128 - fwiw, ICQ is hugely popular in Russia. Or at the very least it was 10 years ago or so. It was the one true IM system. People would remember their ICQ UINs like they do the phone numbers. A 4 or 5 digit UIN was a status symbol and there was a secondary market for selling/buying these. So it is natural that ICQ got bought by Russians. I doubt the privacy issues now are any worse than when ICQ was under AOL, because there was never any privacy to begin with. The protocol is still unencrypted, so anyone who has an access to the network routes between the user and ICQ servers can easily do whatever "data retention". The actual server ownership matters very little. Caveat emptor and all that.
JavaJones:
For your own use, you could look at Pidgin as an alternative to Miranda. Both are fine in my view, but personally I use Meebo so I can have multi-protocol IM wherever I go (and have a web browser), including my chat history and all my accounts for immediate sign-in. Supports HTTPS and tons and tons of IM protocols (but unfortunately not IRC).
There are a zillion IM clients. Why write another one? If you go ahead with that anyway, for format support you can look at utilizing Libpurple, which powers Meebo and Pidgin, among others.
- Oshyan
apankrat:
Oshyan,
"why write another one" is because I would rather spend time and write exactly what I need than put up with existing stuff that does quite not fit. There are always these little annoyances that stick out and that I wish I could fix. But if I were to start fixing them (assuming it's an open source client), then why not write from scratch? I also come from the network development background - I spent several years writing code for the firewall appliances, routers, load-balancers, etc - so (high-performance) protocol parsing and the client-server stuff in general is something that I feel very comfortable with.
That being said I don't actually manage to get to the writing part that often, at least not recently. I was this close to writing an IM client few years ago. Spec'ed it out, did some UI sketching and what not, but then we had a kid and it got shelved with a lot of other stuff. In any case, I made a fairly detailed list of what I wanted in the IM client, and here it is:
Must have (highest priority)
* ICQ support
* plain text messaging
* end-to-end security based on public key caching (SSH-style)
* password-protected, encrypted local configuration profiles
* simultaneous login under multiple accounts of the same service
* available, away, busy and "other" statuses
* support for new contact authorization
* simple, convenient and good-looking UI
* contact grouping (up to two levels in hierarchy)
* easy access to the list of the accounts and their online statuses
* full Unicode support
Need to have (high priority, this needs to be in a beta release)
* tracking contact’s status history (away/busy)
* contact notifications (away/offline -> available, etc)
* meta-contacts (merging 2+ contacts into a single UI entity)
* tabbed chat windows, consecutive message grouping
* modest UI skinning support
* visual nudging
* auto-away
* support for invisibility mode
Nice to have (post-1.0 releases, most important - first)
* AIM, Yahoo, MSN support
* Jabber support
* local contact discovery using Bonjour
* group chat
* some form of file sharing or file exchange
* support for blacklisting contacts
Not needed
These are features typically found in IM clients and that are essentially a result of IM vendors' evolution. These are either a fancy-schmancy stuff or they should be a part of a specialized application. Therefore they should be kept out of the Instant Messaging client.
* rich-text-format (pretty formatted) messaging
* graphical smiles and sounds
* buddy icons
* elaborate support for statuses other than available, away and busy
* multi-level contact grouping (not sure about this one actually)
* audio and video conferencing
* remote desktop access
To this list I would now also add chat continuity, which is probably THE most useful and natural feature to be missing from most of IM clients. That's it.
Pidgin / Miranda do not fit the bill - both in the security/privacy (OTR is a bit unorthodox, I would rather have more conventional encryption architecture) and in the UI/usability departments. Meebo is a no go for privacy reasons, though I have to say it is a nice proggy. Adium is very close, but it's Mac.
If you or anyone else has any thoughts on the list, I'd be curious to hear them. I realize, for example, that the privacy aspect does not matter much to a vast majority of IM users, and that ICQ is not the most popular IM medium... but this is not meant to be a commercial product (or at least not a highly profitable one).
Cheers
Lashiec:
I find curious that you consider tracking status history or visual nudging (why hasn't this been outlawed is beyond me) than Jabber support :)
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