Gaim Beta 2: The Sequel to Beta

I've always disliked the way GAIM and many other IM programs out there are displayed. The functionality is excellent but the idea of a separate window for buddy list and chat seems overkill to me. Couldn't GAIM do one of these:

1. Start from a minimized buddy list
2. Upon initiating a chat, the chat window appears docked to the buddy list window
3. User can minimize the buddy list *into the chat window* or better yet the lists automatically appear when you roll over a hot are on the chat window.

Or:

1. The buddy list hides on the right side of the screen in a doc or hidden pannel.
2. Rolling over that area exposes the buddy list.
3. Upon initiating the chat, the buddy list "panel" hides itself.

I'm currently using the beta, and it isn't too bad. The new status system was not designed for people that like a small window and a minimalistic interface. If you don't like the buddy list window to display buddy icons, you will probably not like the new interface changes. The size and position of the components make it relatively clear that it was designed for use with the verbose display settings.

The D-Bus support is coming along nicely. I have been experimenting with it in python, and it facilitates a lot of really neat external scripting. Unfortunately, the Gaim dbus API still feels like a bunch of wrapped C functions, so you get a lot of stuff like GaimBuddyGetAlias(buddyptr) rather than buddyptr.alias, etc. Aside from the lack of OO friendliness, the D-Bus bindings are really very useful, and I've already managed to do a bunch of great stuff with it. I'll hopefully get around to writing an article or a tutorial about it sometime in the next month or so. I'm still trying to figure out how to access buddy list data, but I have managed to do just about everything else I want to do with it, particularly intercepting messages for custom logging, and providing custom notifications of buddy sign-ins, etc. If anybody has any hints about how to iterate over the buddy list to extract strings and other relevant information, I would appreciate some insight.

The beta also includes some subtle improvements to tab handling that will probably be appreciated by many, but the developers still haven't gotten around to making it so that the tabs can be hidden when only one conversation is active (you know, like the way firefox does it).

This version also has a different interface for connection information. It no longer shows progress bars indicating connection progress of each protocol, instead it just says "connecting" in the status box. When you lose your connection it displays an extra button with notification right above the status box. If your buddy list window width isn't wastefully huge, you won't be able to see what those buttons say.

There are also some nasty bugs still that you want to watch out for if you plan to actually use the beta. If you have a meta-contact that contains multiple buddies and even one of them is not signed in, the whole meta-contact will not appear when offline buddies are hidden. Can anybody else out there confirm this bug?

I compiled from source on my Athlon64 X2 system with 2 GB ram. I enabled spell checking, perl scripting support, dbus, and several other things. I tried to enable mono, but for some reason ./configure didn't want to do that. I assume that means that either my distribution doesn't have the right version of the mono devlopment libs, or mono support isn't complete enough yet to be functional.

My honest opinion is that the new interface needs a lot of work. It solves many of the problems that the interface had before, but it solves them in a way that is strange at best, and abysmally stupid at worst. What is needed is an alternative slim interface for people that just want quick access to their buddy list without all the other cruft. They removed a ton of configuration options, but I think that a lot of what is no longer configurable in the preferences dialog can be made configurable with plug-ins. That isn't necessarily a bad philosophy because it keeps things nice and modular, but it will make the program a little bit painful to use until people get around to making the plug-ins that will make it bearable.

Keep in mind people, this is a beta release and although it is very stable, I believe that a lot of the interface decisions are experimental: an attempt to see what works and what doesn't. It's too soon to bitch about what needs to be different, so don't interpret my comments as an indictment of mistakes, just feedback that reflects my feelings about the current release. Gaim is an excellent program and the developers have always done a great job. I have no doubt that it will meet my high standards by the time it is ready for official release.

This is a screenshot of the interface, note the amount of wasted space for those of us that don't like to see buddy icons.

When messages was received in the old version they were not committed to the log until you actually read them, but they were removed from the server. Thus if Gaim crasched, got killed, or the system froze, then those messages were lost.

Has this changed in the new version?