[JDEV] Jabber Client Design Tutorial

[Julian Missig]

First off, I don't believe in the idea of having similar-looking Jabber 
clients. It would be nice to have a defacto client for each OS which 
looks and acts similarly, but beyond that, I want creativity to shine. I 
want to see different approaches at IM, not 20 VB clients for windows 
which look and act *exactly the same* - what's the point in that?

Replies within.

Jens Alfke wrote:

> * Your list of status states in Jabber is wrong. The default is called 
> "Available", not "None". There is no "N/A", instead you mean "XA" 
> ("extended away", and I have yet to see any coherent description of how 
> this differs from regular "away".) Also, "invisible" is not currently 
> supported by the Jabber server; if you manually set your presence to 
> "unavailable" you stop receiving presence or messages. There's also an 
> implicit "unknown" state for people whose presence you don't have a 
> subscription to (presumably because they haven't approved your request 
> yet.)
> 


Actually, latest jabberd does support invisible.


> * You don't mention one issue that bugs me about current Jabber clients. 
> The Jabber "resource name" is associated with a particular login. The 
> best usage of this is to identify the location of the client, i.e. 
> "work" or "laptop" or "home". For a non-PC client the type might be 
> useful, like "cellphone" or "T900 pager". However, whenever I look at my 
> buddy list it seems like most of the clients (gabber, winjab, etc.) just 
> use the name of the client as the resource name. This is fairly useless 
> -- usually I don't care what brand of desktop client they use. It /is/ 
> often useful to know whether they're at home, at work, in a cafe, 
> whatever. IMHO the client, when first run, should ask the user to enter 
> a resource name, and it should store that as a persistent preference. 
> This type-in field should not default to the brand name of the client; 
> it should be blank to encourage the user to type something meaningful.
> 


According to all statistics I can get ahold of and from various small user tests - people do *not* easily understand the concept of a resource unless they specifically intend to be logged in multiple times - and *most* users never use that feature of Jabber. Therefore, 'Gabber' is the default resource to reduce confusion - if the user doesn't understand it, they don't have to become frustrated trying to figure out what is going on. They can live happily without know what a resource is. That's the entire point of the MacOS HI guideline which states that options are nice, but you *must* *have* *good* *defaults*.


If in the future the majority of users need to understand the concept of 
a resource, I'll gladly remove the default, but the point of UI is to 
reduce the amount of information a user must learn and retain.

I need sleep



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