[JDEV] UI opinions..

[Scott Robinson]

Microsoft had the right idea when it allowed users to just drag and drop the
buttons they liked onto the tool bar.

Configurability with simplicity is the way everyone _wants_ to go, but
getting there seems to be the problem. Bars or menus? Both?

While the ICQesque interface is generally agreed to be evil, that is what
the user expects. At the very least, we should have a client that has a
similar UI.

Skins? Customizable UI? If we wrote a standard (read portable) Jabber client
that supported radical modification of the UI with a few nice defaults that
we created, I would think this would solve all our problems. You may say
"but that would be to hard! Think of all the code we'd have write to
specialize the interface..."

Scripting language? If we have a scripting language for the Jabber client,
then I would hope it could modify the UI. In fact, why just modify, why not
control! jabber.cfg points to a script which in effect is all the UI code.
This would drastically reduce our porting problems if we were to go the
standard client route. If we move as much as we can to our scripting
language, leaving the actual network code and VM to be ported it would make
our job much easier.

While everyone on our Jabber list are techies, if we want Jabber to succeed
in "The Real World" then we need to make it easy for users. When that Jabber
install program boots up, its only question should be "How do you want
Jabber to look? ICQ/AIMesque? mIRCesqe? ..." and etc.

As always, I'm officially "on crack" so anything I say can be disregarded.

Scott.

* Vivre Draco translated into ASCII [Fri, Aug 06, 1999 at 12:23:36AM -0500][<VPOP31.3.0b.19990806002337.570.1d.1.130a3d50 at oakwind>]
> On 4 Aug 99,, Ben Apple sounded off on Re: [JDEV] UI opinions..:
> 
> > 	When given a choice, some users prefer buttons and some menu
> > bars... I think it's a good idea to have the complete bunch in the
> > menu bars, and the more basic (and frequently used) duplicated on
> > the list window. 
> 
>    Guess it's time to expand on my last message (which, for those of 
> you who are skimming, consisted entirely of the words  
> "Configurability, configurability, configurability!").
[snap]
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