[JDEV] MSN, and Jabber's usability

[mike at fenz.net]

At 12:15 13/12/02 +0100, Bart van Bragt wrote:
>It was a breeze to convert something like 30 people in my surroundings 
>to Trillian, they where fed up with using ICQ and MSN at the same time. 
>I just don't want to convert them to Jabber yet. They are going to have 
>a bad experience (from the endusers point of view!), they'll start to 
>dislike Jabber (too unreliable, too complicated, too geeky) and after 
>that it will be quite a challenge to convert them to Jabber or XMMP...

Just thought I'd pop my head up at this point and introduce myself. I'm
having a play around with the client end of Jabber, as a hobby thing
really. I have a few aims:

1. To understand how Jabber works
2. To see whether it's workable as a network back end for a tiny freeware
game I'm planning to write.
3. To produce a 'nice' Jabber client. When I say 'nice', I mean it should
look nice, and be a no-brainer to use for people who have come from ICQ and
AIM backgrounds. Having read your notes, I might remove MSN from my aims
for now...

It's this last point that I thought might be on-topic; the clients I've
seen for Jabber so far have been technically quite competent, but not
exactly easy/friendly to use. I couldn't give any of them to my mother,
she'd have no idea what to do with it. Even my brother would probably have
trouble with it, and he's quite technically minded.

Current progress: A working back-end for a Jabber client. It does
messaging, presence, and registration with transports is in progress,
nearly done. I think I'm doing OK - it's only taken a couple of days,
including writing the XML parser. Easier than I thought. But - no UI yet!

Anyway, just a 'hello' note really, I'll go back to lurking now.

Mike van Bokhoven