Emoticon wtf



  • So, apparently for build 0178 of Windows Live Messenger 8.1, Microsoft got tired of those old boring emoticon names and decided to shake things up a bit:

     

    Thinking Smiley was also redubbed "Settings".

    This ridiculousness appears to have been fixed in 8.5 .



  • I've always found MSN Messenger does strange things. Tooltips are a particular problem, popping up in strange places, not going away, freezing that sort of thing. It also opens your hotmail page within IE, even if Fx is your default.

    I'm sure plenty of people who don't use the Messenger, but it's difficult not to if you want the latest features, like webcam and games.



  • Yeah, it drives me NUTS when tooltips or menu items get stuck on the screen for no particular reason, but I reported this one because it's consistent and build-wide.  I was totally amused when I asked my active contacts and everyone with the current 8.1 build had the same problem and everyone with the new 8.5 had no idea what I was talking about :)



  • @yet another Matt said:

    I'm sure plenty of people who don't use the Messenger, but it's difficult not to if you want the latest features, like webcam and games.

    Oh yes, I frequently find I have the problem that games don't work unless you use MSN Messenger.

    What planet are you on?
     



  • @asuffield said:

    @yet another Matt said:

    I'm sure plenty of people who don't use the Messenger, but it's difficult not to if you want the latest features, like webcam and games.

    Oh yes, I frequently find I have the problem that games don't work unless you use MSN Messenger.

    What planet are you on?
     

     The planet where MSN Messenger contains minigames that do not suck, apparently.

    Trillian would always respond with incompatibility warnings when someone tried to drag me into that. I considered it a feature.



  • @Arancaytar said:

    Trillian would always respond with incompatibility warnings when someone tried to drag me into that. I considered it a feature.
    Hear hear! Same deal with Gaim, which thankfully has saved me from countless attempted webcam and microphone conversations as well as other silliness.



  • @Arancaytar said:

    @asuffield said:
    @yet another Matt said:

    I'm sure plenty of people who don't use the Messenger, but it's difficult not to if you want the latest features, like webcam and games.

    Oh yes, I frequently find I have the problem that games don't work unless you use MSN Messenger.

    What planet are you on?
     

     The planet where MSN Messenger contains minigames that do not suck, apparently.

    Trillian would always respond with incompatibility warnings when someone tried to drag me into that. I considered it a feature.

    You appear to have forgotten about the fairer of the species who considers these sorts of things fun. Kinda helps when living long distances from your family or partner.

    I actually used to love Trillian, I could combine all my chats in to one app, save computer resources and such, these days it's a rare day I open MSN.



  • @Welbog said:

    Hear hear! Same deal with Gaim...

    Hopefully a lapsus fingerae and not a sign that you're still using Gaim and not Pidgin ;-)



  • @yet another Matt said:

    You appear to have forgotten about the fairer of the species who considers these sorts of things fun.

    Why are you in love with someone who like this stuff? Get a sane one. They exist! I have seen them! Some of them don't even like the color pink -- and drink Guinness every now and then.



  • @dhromed said:

    @yet another Matt said:

    You appear to have forgotten about the fairer of the species who considers these sorts of things fun.

    Why are you in love with someone who like this stuff? Get a sane one. They exist! I have seen them! Some of them don't even like the color pink -- and drink Guinness every now and then.

    Who said anything about love?



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @dhromed said:

    @yet another Matt said:

    You appear to have forgotten about the fairer of the species who considers these sorts of things fun.

    Why are you in love with someone who like this stuff? Get a sane one. They exist! I have seen them! Some of them don't even like the color pink -- and drink Guinness every now and then.

    Who said anything about love?

    Why play these games with the fairer of the species if not out of some serious mind-altering affection?



  • @dhromed said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    @dhromed said:

    @yet another Matt said:

    You appear to have forgotten about the fairer of the species who considers these sorts of things fun.

    Why are you in love with someone who like this stuff? Get a sane one. They exist! I have seen them! Some of them don't even like the color pink -- and drink Guinness every now and then.

    Who said anything about love?

    Why play these games with the fairer of the species if not out of some serious mind-altering affection?

    Um. Do I really have to explain this to you?



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @dhromed said:
    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    @dhromed said:

    @yet another Matt said:

    You appear to have forgotten about the fairer of the species who considers these sorts of things fun.

    Why are you in love with someone who like this stuff? Get a sane one. They exist! I have seen them! Some of them don't even like the color pink -- and drink Guinness every now and then.

    Who said anything about love?

    Why play these games with the fairer of the species if not out of some serious mind-altering affection?

    Um. Do I really have to explain this to you?

    Given the phrasing of his last comment, I suspect you may have to.



  • @Volmarias said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    @dhromed said:
    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    @dhromed said:

    @yet another Matt said:

    You appear to have forgotten about the fairer of the species who considers these sorts of things fun.

    Why are you in love with someone who like this stuff? Get a sane one. They exist! I have seen them! Some of them don't even like the color pink -- and drink Guinness every now and then.

    Who said anything about love?

    Why play these games with the fairer of the species if not out of some serious mind-altering affection?

    Um. Do I really have to explain this to you?

    Given the phrasing of his last comment, I suspect you may have to.

    http://www.google.com/search?q=how+babies+are+made



  • meh, for the record, I HATE gaim/pidgin.  it fucks up constantly and has no features.  In linux I use aMSN.  In windows I use the live messenger client with msgplus and the mess.be patch.  I won't put up with microsoft's client out-of-the-box, but with plugins and patches i find it superior to clones.  I have no use for anything other than the msn network so multi-messengers no longer appeal.



  • @misguided said:

    meh, for the record, I HATE gaim/pidgin.  it fucks up constantly and has no features. [citation needed]

    I might be tempted to agree with you if you were still running something like gaim 0.10. By 1.5 it really wasn't too bad, but Pidgin has been pretty reliable. My only gripe with 2.3.1 is that it sometimes closes idle conversation windows spontaneously, which is weird -- I've gone back to 2.3.0 for now. No big deal really. The list of supplied plugins is pretty long and most of them are unticked -- I have no use for them. The program has far more features than I need, and there's a whole shedload of third-party ones in the Plugin Pack. I love how you can enable, disable, install and uninstall plugins on the fly without having to restart the app. Installing them is just a matter of dropping the relevant .DLL into a folder -- amazingly Mac-like coming from a culture that is so diametrically opposite to what Apple stand for.

    Granted, MSN support is notably lacking, but there's not a lot of any relevance missing. Probably some stupid games, handwriting (what, do they think I'm writing a letter?) and other tosh. Yahoo's stupid buzz feature is also missing, at least, the bit where it shakes the window like your desktop is sat over a fault line.



  • @misguided said:

    meh, for the record, I HATE gaim/pidgin.  it fucks up constantly and has no features.  In linux I use aMSN.  In windows I use the live messenger client with msgplus and the mess.be patch.  I won't put up with microsoft's client out-of-the-box, but with plugins and patches i find it superior to clones.  I have no use for anything other than the msn network so multi-messengers no longer appeal.

    * Starts another flamewar
     



  • @Mal1024 said:

    @misguided said:

    meh, for the record, I HATE gaim/pidgin.  it fucks up constantly and has no features.  In linux I use aMSN.  In windows I use the live messenger client with msgplus and the mess.be patch.  I won't put up with microsoft's client out-of-the-box, but with plugins and patches i find it superior to clones.  I have no use for anything other than the msn network so multi-messengers no longer appeal.

    * Starts another flamewar
     

    eh sorry, I didn't mean to start a flamewar!  It's just personal preference and experience.  I never liked the way gaim displayed, it reminds me of AIM and that to me is really awkward.  Everything is giant by default which rubs me the wrong way.  Chats are tabbed by default which realllly rubs me the wrong way.  But I'd remain neutral on it if it weren't for the fact that Pidgin came not only pre-compiled but installed and integrated in Ubuntu Studio 7.10, and yet stalled alllll the damn time.  MAybe it was just something about the real-time kernel, but I was very much not impressed.  And aMSN has had webcam support for how long now?

    But yeah, anyone who likes pidgin for MSN use is more than welcome to use it.  I just think of it as a jabber client personally. 



  • @misguided said:

    @Mal1024 said:

    @misguided said:

    meh, for the record, I HATE gaim/pidgin.  it fucks up constantly and has no features.  In linux I use aMSN.  In windows I use the live messenger client with msgplus and the mess.be patch.  I won't put up with microsoft's client out-of-the-box, but with plugins and patches i find it superior to clones.  I have no use for anything other than the msn network so multi-messengers no longer appeal.

    * Starts another flamewar
     

    eh sorry, I didn't mean to start a flamewar!  It's just personal preference and experience.  I never liked the way gaim displayed, it reminds me of AIM and that to me is really awkward.  Everything is giant by default which rubs me the wrong way.  Chats are tabbed by default which realllly rubs me the wrong way.  But I'd remain neutral on it if it weren't for the fact that Pidgin came not only pre-compiled but installed and integrated in Ubuntu Studio 7.10, and yet stalled alllll the damn time.  MAybe it was just something about the real-time kernel, but I was very much not impressed.  And aMSN has had webcam support for how long now?

    But yeah, anyone who likes pidgin for MSN use is more than welcome to use it.  I just think of it as a jabber client personally. 

    Miranda + History++ = win :)
     



  • @yet another Matt said:

    I'm sure plenty of people who don't use the Messenger, but it's difficult not to if you want the latest features, like webcam and games.


    Such as me.



  • Kopete >> Gaim. Unless you can't spare the memory for the KDE libs. Or are on Windows.



  • @m0ffx said:

    Kopete >> Gaim. Unless you can't spare the memory for the KDE libs. Or are on Windows.

    You say this like you're totally ignorant of everything the Pidgin team have done since 2.0b7 where the name changed to Pidgin. I don't know whether use of "Gaim" is force of habit or just complete ignorance that anything has happened to the project since ... goodness, when was 2.0b7? It's been Pidgin for a while now. If it's just force of habit, that's OK, but using the old name of a project weakens your argument, since it implies a lot of ignorance. I really like what's happened to the program -- gaim 1.x is pretty awful in comparison. It's come up a long way since it was gaim.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @m0ffx said:
    Kopete >> Gaim. Unless you can't spare the memory for the KDE libs. Or are on Windows.

    You say this like you're totally ignorant of everything the Pidgin team have done since 2.0b7 where the name changed to Pidgin. I don't know whether use of "Gaim" is force of habit or just complete ignorance that anything has happened to the project since ... goodness, when was 2.0b7? It's been Pidgin for a while now. If it's just force of habit, that's OK, but using the old name of a project weakens your argument, since it implies a lot of ignorance. I really like what's happened to the program -- gaim 1.x is pretty awful in comparison. It's come up a long way since it was gaim.

    I was. The use of Gaim was because the last version I used was called Gaim. I've tested Pidgin today. It's improved, true, but it's still worse than Kopete. Particular gripes are the default of tabbed windows, and with that turned off, putting new windows directly over existing ones, and the lack of Kopete's notifications for contacts coming online (a box pops up) and contacts starting chats (the speech bubble).

    Also, my university's computers don't have the latest-and-greatest version of either, so there, the difference is more pronounced.

    Oh, and the name change was in April 2007. Frankly not that long ago.



  • @m0ffx said:

    I've tested Pidgin today. It's improved, true, but it's still worse than Kopete. Particular gripes are the default of tabbed windows

    Honestly, if you consider this a gripe, you have got problems. Serious ones. Pidgin is particularly light on settings and whether or not to use tabs is one of the first things you see when you open the Preferences window. Anyone on <stong>this forum who would disregard a program out of the sheer stubbornness against ticking one obvious box in the preferences, has issues. No reasonably complex program will come out of the box^Wdownload configured exactly the way we want it. That's why programs have settings -- what did you think the Preferences window existed for?

    @m0ffx said:

    ... and with that turned off, putting new windows directly over existing ones

    I thought Kopete was an X11 app, in which case, your window manager probably has issues. The window manager is there to manage windows.

    @m0ffx said:

    ... and the lack of Kopete's notifications for contacts coming online (a box pops up) and contacts starting chats (the speech bubble).

    Right, because a program should come out of the box complete with every feature imaginable. Firefox for example -- it's horrible when I run it without all my usual plugins. I can't even roll the mousewheel to flick between tabs. That's just life -- modular software comes at the expense of having to be built up by the user into the program they want, but at the benefit of being far more flexible, and not cluttered with countless features that you have to ignore. Pidgin ships with plenty of plugins, and there are plenty more to install, particularly the Plugin Pack. For pop-up notifications, install GUIfications.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @m0ffx said:
    I've tested Pidgin today. It's improved, true, but it's still worse than Kopete. Particular gripes are the default of tabbed windows

    Honestly, if you consider this a gripe, you have got problems. Serious ones. Pidgin is particularly light on settings and whether or not to use tabs is one of the first things you see when you open the Preferences window. Anyone on <stong>this forum who would disregard a program out of the sheer stubbornness against ticking one obvious box in the preferences, has issues. No reasonably complex program will come out of the box^Wdownload configured exactly the way we want it. That's why programs have settings -- what did you think the Preferences window existed for?</stong>

    This would explain 90% of the arguments on this forum.

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @m0ffx said:

    ... and with that turned off, putting new windows directly over existing ones

    I thought Kopete was an X11 app, in which case, your window manager probably has issues. The window manager is there to manage windows.

    @m0ffx said:

    ... and the lack of Kopete's notifications for contacts coming online (a box pops up) and contacts starting chats (the speech bubble).

    Right, because a program should come out of the box complete with every feature imaginable. Firefox for example -- it's horrible when I run it without all my usual plugins. I can't even roll the mousewheel to flick between tabs. That's just life -- modular software comes at the expense of having to be built up by the user into the program they want, but at the benefit of being far more flexible, and not cluttered with countless features that you have to ignore. Pidgin ships with plenty of plugins, and there are plenty more to install, particularly the Plugin Pack. For pop-up notifications, install GUIfications.

    Again, your argument here could be applied to most of the arguments on this site. Need to come up with a simple regular expression bot based on this.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @m0ffx said:
    I've tested Pidgin today. It's improved, true, but it's still worse than Kopete. Particular gripes are the default of tabbed windows

    Honestly, if you consider this a gripe, you have got problems. Serious ones. Pidgin is particularly light on settings and whether or not to use tabs is one of the first things you see when you open the Preferences window. Anyone on <stong>this forum who would disregard a program out of the sheer stubbornness against ticking one obvious box in the preferences, has issues. No reasonably complex program will come out of the box^Wdownload configured exactly the way we want it. That's why programs have settings -- what did you think the Preferences window existed for?</stong>

    @m0ffx said:

    ... and with that turned off, putting new windows directly over existing ones

    I thought Kopete was an X11 app, in which case, your window manager probably has issues. The window manager is there to manage windows.

    @m0ffx said:

    ... and the lack of Kopete's notifications for contacts coming online (a box pops up) and contacts starting chats (the speech bubble).

    Right, because a program should come out of the box complete with every feature imaginable. Firefox for example -- it's horrible when I run it without all my usual plugins. I can't even roll the mousewheel to flick between tabs. That's just life -- modular software comes at the expense of having to be built up by the user into the program they want, but at the benefit of being far more flexible, and not cluttered with countless features that you have to ignore. Pidgin ships with plenty of plugins, and there are plenty more to install, particularly the Plugin Pack. For pop-up notifications, install GUIfications.

    And for search, install the SwampSearch plugin. 

     

    Oops, wrong thread. 



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    <stong>

    Right, because a program should come out of the box complete with every feature imaginable.



    Really?  Notification of a friend coming online counts as bloat now?



  • @Cap'n Steve said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    <stong></stong>

    Right, because a program should come out of the box complete with every feature imaginable.



    Really? Notification of a friend coming online counts as bloat now?

    Well, Miranda  believes that a proper chat history is bloat, so I'm guessing times they are a-changing. :</p>

    (it blinks a Yay Puppet icon when someone goes online. Personally, I dislike the slide-up boxes. Too big.) 



  • @Cap'n Steve said:

    Really? Notification of a friend coming online counts as bloat now?

    I installed GUIfications once, but found that it seemed to be causing gaim to freeze every so often, got tired of it, and removed it. That was a long time ago, so I imagine it's all fixed now, but I've never desired to have it back. Most people on my buddy list aren't people I want to start a conversation with, so I get tired of bings and bongs and stuff popping up on the screen for no reason, so to me it's a useless feature. If I really want to talk to someone, I just e-mail them, or leave them a message via the automatic buddy pounce generator plugin (shipped with Pidgin) that detects that the network can't take offline messages and saves a buddy pounce to be sent as soon as they sign on.

    Pidgin already ships with far more plugins than Firefox or ShadowIRC, but it can't support everything as standard, and GUIfications is pretty fancy and complex. Modular software just works this way -- Photoshop, ShadowIRC, Winamp, Pidgin, X-Chat, Firefox, Thunderbird, Windows Explorer -- you always add at least one new feature using third-party add-ons. I am a huge fan of modular software for this reason; it also removes the need to fight a jihad against the developers because they refuse to add your precious feature, take your code patches etc. You can alter the program outside of the developers' intent without having to have them ratify and accept it. You don't even need software to be open source for this, and many highly extensible apps are closed source.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Most people on my buddy list aren't people I want to start a conversation with. If I really want to talk to someone, I just e-mail them,

    Sir, why do you have an IM client? 



  • @dhromed said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Most people on my buddy list aren't people I want to start a conversation with. If I really want to talk to someone, I just e-mail them,

    Sir, why do you have an IM client? 

    I am not quite sure why I wrote that, or what I meant. Human communication is so broken though. There are plenty of people whose status on IM is meaningless -- being marked as Available is pretty synonymous with "I will ignore anything you write". I imagine they mean "I will ignore anything you write while I am away and I will close the IM client when I get back to the PC and ignore all pending messages" but have also failed to understand what Auto-Away means. Or, they leave their status permanently set to Away whether they're there or not, and you just have to guess.

    Sometimes I take extended breaks from IM (just quit the program and remove it from start-up items) because I can't tolerate all this nonsense any more. People who, when you go to talk to them on one subject, ignore what you said and hijack the conversation as excuse to talk about what they want, despite having had all day to say it were it truly that important.

    I think what I meant was, instead of waiting for them to turn up on IM (those toasters are likely to appear and subsequently vanish while you're answering Nature's call or staring at another screen) it's easier to just fire off an e-mail (to which they will never respond anyway) or send an IM immediately -- ICQ and Yahoo will buffer it until they sign on, and for other protocols, Pidgin's Offline Message Emulation will create a buddy pounce for each message to be delivered as soon as they sign on.

    What I also meant, which will be obvious to most, is that IM is useful for business and project partners, developers you need to talk to sometimes, leeches, and other casual acquaintances whose online/offline status is irrelevant. There are some people of course who do matter, but if I had nothing to say to them before they signed on, I won't now either, and if they want me, they'll see I'm there and speak up.



  • Perhaps you need a change of policy on which people to put on your contact list. :)

    leeches, and other casual acquaintances whose online/offline status is irrelevant.
     

    Delete them!

    I've deleted more people than I've currently on my list.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @m0ffx said:
    ... and with that turned off, putting new windows directly over existing ones

    I thought Kopete was an X11 app, in which case, your window manager probably has issues. The window manager is there to manage windows.

    I believe programs, when they open a window, can instruct the window manager where to place it (and how large it is). Kopete normally places new conversation windows differently to existing ones, Pidgin does not. Whether it's actually Kopete doing this or something else in KDE I don't know.

    Also, I want a program to come out of the box with the features I want. I know that won't normally be the case. But I'll still look more favourably on the program that has it (Kopete) than on the one that I'll have to go hunting for plugins to get it (Pidgin).

    And the bottom line is, I prefer Kopete to Pidgin.



  • @dhromed said:

    Perhaps you need a change of policy on which people to put on your contact list. :)

    Delete them!

    I've deleted more people than I've currently on my list.

    *sigh* As the saying goes, “A hard man is good to find”.

    I've deleted plenty of people, but probably less that the amount who simply signed off one day and never came back. One good friend tends to disappear from ICQ for many months at a time, appearing for brief periods probably centred around full moons and what not.

    I have no idea how to find decent folk -- I guess I always look in the wrong places. It tends to be by pure chance when you least expect it.

    @m0ffx said:

    Also, I want a program to come out of the box with the features I want. I know that won't normally be the case. But I'll still look more favourably on the program that has it (Kopete) than on the one that I'll have to go hunting for plugins to get it (Pidgin).

    And the bottom line is, I prefer Kopete to Pidgin.

    Ultimately the point is that you must qualify your opinions in anything -- "Kopete >> Gaim" (shift $Kopete by $Gaim bits?) isn't terribly useful to anyone anywhere. Honestly, nor is "I want it to ship with precisely all the features I need and be configured exactly how I like", since everyone's needs vary. Making clear that it has some kind of toaster notification is more useful, although in general it's more useful to note whether Kopete and Pidgin have more serious differences. Stability, protocol support, etc.

    One of Pidgin's most annoying problems is that it only supports MSN file transfers via the MSN servers, which max out at around 5 kB/sec and frequently peak at 2 or 3. MSN file transfers to or from Pidgin users are horribly slow which is pretty frustrating at times. File transfers in general have been a really sore point, with random, useless error messages and crashes for all protocols, although most of this seems fixed now.

    MSN support is generally poor although, transfer speed aside, I don't need all the frivolous crap -- just for messages to arrive safely and promptly. MSN though seems to be the worst IM network in existence, which doesn't help matters -- if anything drops out, fails with weird errors or generally misbehaves, it tends to be MSN, at least in Pidgin. It does get hard to tell whose fault anything is -- for example, a lot of random errors are due to Microsoft's ridiculous word filtering. Maybe the rest is due to outdated protocol code in Pidgin?

    The only other reasonable alternative for Windows is Miranda IM, but the settings are so convoluted (millions of them to trudge through and still the ones you need are missing), it's missing basic features like tabs, and all the plugins seem to suck rocks. I ticked the setting to leave the app open with the buddy list closed, but kept finding it had quit on me anyway. Turns out you have to set the buddy list to a tool palette first to get that to work, but they never thought any of it through properly. The plugins tend to cause it to crash, and most implementations of anything are as twisted and bizarre as the app itself. Pidgin by comparison is remarkably simple, smooth and targeted at getting all the basics right.

    Pidgin as gaim sucked horribly, with a really awful interface, but since the 2.0 beta series it's come up leaps and bounds and I am glad I stuck with it all this time.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @dhromed said:

    Perhaps you need a change of policy on which people to put on your contact list. :)

    Delete them!

    I've deleted more people than I've currently on my list.

    *sigh* As the saying goes, “A hard man is good to find”.

    I've deleted plenty of people, but probably less that the amount who simply signed off one day and never came back. One good friend tends to disappear from ICQ for many months at a time, appearing for brief periods probably centred around full moons and what not.

    I have no idea how to find decent folk -- I guess I always look in the wrong places. It tends to be by pure chance when you least expect it.

    @m0ffx said:

    Also, I want a program to come out of the box with the features I want. I know that won't normally be the case. But I'll still look more favourably on the program that has it (Kopete) than on the one that I'll have to go hunting for plugins to get it (Pidgin).

    And the bottom line is, I prefer Kopete to Pidgin.

    Ultimately the point is that you must qualify your opinions in anything -- "Kopete >> Gaim" (shift $Kopete by $Gaim bits?) isn't terribly useful to anyone anywhere. Honestly, nor is "I want it to ship with precisely all the features I need and be configured exactly how I like", since everyone's needs vary. Making clear that it has some kind of toaster notification is more useful, although in general it's more useful to note whether Kopete and Pidgin have more serious differences. Stability, protocol support, etc.

    One of Pidgin's most annoying problems is that it only supports MSN file transfers via the MSN servers, which max out at around 5 kB/sec and frequently peak at 2 or 3. MSN file transfers to or from Pidgin users are horribly slow which is pretty frustrating at times. File transfers in general have been a really sore point, with random, useless error messages and crashes for all protocols, although most of this seems fixed now.

    MSN support is generally poor although, transfer speed aside, I don't need all the frivolous crap -- just for messages to arrive safely and promptly. MSN though seems to be the worst IM network in existence, which doesn't help matters -- if anything drops out, fails with weird errors or generally misbehaves, it tends to be MSN, at least in Pidgin. It does get hard to tell whose fault anything is -- for example, a lot of random errors are due to Microsoft's ridiculous word filtering. Maybe the rest is due to outdated protocol code in Pidgin?

    The only other reasonable alternative for Windows is Miranda IM, but the settings are so convoluted (millions of them to trudge through and still the ones you need are missing), it's missing basic features like tabs, and all the plugins seem to suck rocks. I ticked the setting to leave the app open with the buddy list closed, but kept finding it had quit on me anyway. Turns out you have to set the buddy list to a tool palette first to get that to work, but they never thought any of it through properly. The plugins tend to cause it to crash, and most implementations of anything are as twisted and bizarre as the app itself. Pidgin by comparison is remarkably simple, smooth and targeted at getting all the basics right.

    Pidgin as gaim sucked horribly, with a really awful interface, but since the 2.0 beta series it's come up leaps and bounds and I am glad I stuck with it all this time.

    Wow.  I think Daniel Beardsmore gets the award for (on average) the wordiest posts.

    Also, I always figured that most people over the age of 19 just used IM to keep in touch with people they already know, as opposed to using it to meet people.

    What about you? 

    I know that's true for me, with the following exception:  I met my wife on a personals site when I was 23. 



  • The only other reasonable alternative for Windows is Miranda IM, but the settings are so convoluted (millions of them to trudge through and still the ones you need are missing), it's missing basic features like tabs, and all the plugins seem to suck rocks. I ticked the setting to leave the app open with the buddy list closed, but kept finding it had quit on me anyway. Turns out you have to set the buddy list to a tool palette first to get that to work, but they never thought any of it through properly. The plugins tend to cause it to crash, and most implementations of anything are as twisted and bizarre as the app itself.

    I think that's actually right on target as far as Miranda's suckings go.

    But:

    - once set, I barely touch the settings anyway, but I agree that there are SO DAMN MANY.
    - I don't think I prefer tabs. Tabs are a system of a "sub-taskbar", grouping of several windows -- done properly, unlike Windows taskbar grouping which sucks. But I have at most 2 chats open, and last time that happened was a year ago. So I suppose that's a matter of usage & demand.
    - The only plugin you need, History++, works properly & like a charm. I don't see what more I need to exchange text messages with someone.
    - I can't reproduce the tool-window-close-hide-quirk. It has always worked for me, and I never click the close button anyway: unfocus => hide into tray.

    Miranda pros:
    - it's fucking tiny. Real fucking tiny. And the icons are nice and crisp.


  • Yes, I'm about as terse as assuffield is verbose.

    I've not gone looking for new people via IM in some time, although my IM details are public (my site, forums etc) and I get new people contact me every so often.


Log in to reply