A better messenger
I've been trying for a while to find a good IM client, but none of them really do the job of being simple and useful. I even tried installing Trillian and Miranda, but realized that I just don't care enough to "customize it just how I like it". It should be good without me having to do anything.
There are decent messengers. iChat and Adium. Both are for Mac. But they still follow the basic recipe. Strangely enough, messengers of the 21st century are not much different from messengers 15 years ago. It seems that evolution hasn't visited this part of the IT landscape. They all look pretty much like this:
Even taking into account all the changes that have been made, not much has changed. So, I started thinking about what a good* messenger would be like.
* "Good" for me. I didn't do user research for this, because I don't care. I'm talking about my own needs and tastes.
First of all, I mostly use Windows, which means that EVERYTHING IS MAXIMIZED. I never have this bullshit:
So I don't want to use things like Growl or Miranda to constantly hover on top of my active (and only) window. Windows 7 has a marvelous solution for this, which is the window preview feature of the taskbar. However, they neglected to implement it with Windows Live Messenger. Here's what that looks like:
Um, thanks... Very helpful. Well, ok, the contacts window isn't open. Maybe that will help:
Much better... To be fair, I can move the cursor over to the contacts window's preview, and Windows will show it to me, but that's two times that I have to carefully aim. Paul Fitts must be spinning in his grave.
Ok, enough criticizm. What do I propose? Well, Mac OS introduced to the world the full-screen dashboard, which is exactly what we need. I want something like a people space, that shows me all my contacts, instead of a small window. Just think about it... all that advertising space! This way, when I click the chat icon in the taskbar (or press a shortcut key), I see something like this:
The People Space. Ok, what's going on here? First of all, the status is gone. Why? Because I don't care if you are Busy, Away, Out To Lunch, Be Right Back, or anything else. Either you are there, or you are not. Boolean logic. If you are there, I can see you clearly. If you are not there, I don't see you as well because you've faded into the background. Away or Busy is exactly the same thing. I can still send you messages, you just don't occupy my attention.
People like to put important messages next to their name, and I can dig that, so those are shown as speech bubbles (which I seem to have confused with tooltips).
Double-clicking on a user closes the people space and opens a regular chat window. Clicking in an empty space or pressing Esc takes me back to the desktop. Also, contacts can be resized to be bigger or smaller, so my wife is bigger than my boss, for example.
Oh, and in such a setup people are not limited to tiny 96x96 pictures.
And the best part: quickly mousing over the chat icon, instead of showing me a live preview of the window, can show me the whole damn dashboard, but without extraneous stuff, like user messages. For quick peeks they aren't that important. Or maybe they are. What do I know? It even uses Windows' blurred glass to separate the people from the desktop in the back.
Simple, no? :)