[JDEV] Jabber Client Design Tutorial

[Julian Missig]

I, of course, agree with temas here. I have quite a few comments 
already, but I'll look at your guide a bit more thoroughly tomorrow and 
make a reply.

One major thing that struck me was that you said server hard disk space 
won't be wasted by history.

My logs from the past two years total 50 megs. 50 megs... 100 000 users 
on a server. Even 10 000 users on a server. Would you care to pay for 
that much disk space?

And remember, these messages are all plain text. Just wait until we have 
rich text formatted messages.

Julian
-- 
email: julian at jabber.org
jabber:julian at jabber.org

temas wrote:

> Julian (x-virge) and I were discussing client design yesterday and I
> think you are a prime example of our discussion.  There is a problem
> with Jabber, in general it's not everyones first IM client.  Users have
> generally been on another large network (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!) before
> they come to Jabber.  Despite their not liking the system (that's why
> they came to Jabber isn't it? ;-]) they tend to like their client,
> usually because they are comfortable with it.  If i had to guess, by
> reading your doc (which I did), you come from ICQ.  Now I say this with
> absolutely no direction to you, but I find ICQ's UI absolutely
> atrocious, even AIM's is pretty wicked, so is Yahoo!, MSN is partially
> acceptable, but has many disparities.  I say all that from a purely UI
> centric view.  The idea of a doc to help get people rolling beyond the
> protocol is a great idea and there are many odd things about Jabber that
> merit UI discussion (iq:browse, it could easily have a browser view like
> winjab, but could also be a simple tree view like the explorer sidebar),
> but I would encourage you to weigh in many options, not a single view.
> Open it up, and don't suggest that only one thing is correct, because
> you never will please everyone, especially in the IM world.
> 
> --temas
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, 2001-09-22 at 20:30, Michael Brown wrote:
> 
>>In an effort to generate some debate, and give people some ideas when
>>designing Jabber clients, I have put together a brief tutorial document
>>which is up on my site.
>>
>>http://aurora.gen.nz/jabber_design/
>>
>>Can I ask some people who are more familiar with the Jabber protocol to take
>>5 minutes and read though it to make sure I am not advocating anything that
>>is impossible with the current Jabber spec, or if there is anything too
>>obvious that I haven't included.
>>
>>Also, it's something of a first draft, so if anyone has good ideas to add,
>>or things that they think should really be changed, please let me know.
>>Feedback to the jdev list or direct email is fine.
>>
>>The document is intended as an illustrated guide to GUI design, and doesn't
>>contain any programming specific details.
>>
>>Can someone also tell me how I can get a link added to the docs section on
>>jabber.org?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>Michael.
>>