[JDEV] Jabber Client Design Tutorial

[Julian Fitzell]

On 24/09/2001 at 9:57 PM Julian Missig wrote:

>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?

agree 100%

>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*.

But, even if a user doesn't intent to log on multiple times simultaneously, a description of where they are currently logged in from is still useful.  Surely it is clear to a user that they are entering a description of what computer they are logging in from and when they look at another user in their roster they can see where they are logged in from?... even if they don't understand the concept of resources and how they interact.

If I gave a Jabber client to an inexperienced Jabber user and it said enter a description of where you are connecting from, they would enter "Home" or "Laptop" or something and then they would never have to worry about it again.

Julian (the other one)