Yesterday I blogged a screenshot of gaim and some new ui. Apparently Sean got some angry emails, ims, and other angryness. He sent me an email, which I am putting here in full for all to read.
Hi Todd. You caused quite a stir with your blog about the uber-sexy new Gaim preferences dialog. I've been getting hate-mail/im's/irc-messages all day. You failed to mention (or perhaps even realize) that the screenshot comes from a CVS branch that is currently in very active development and that a release most likely won't come from it in at least a month. As such, you shouldn't assume anything is complete. You'll also notice you can't set an away message at all. We're not removing that feature from Gaim either. The assumption being made by people thinking the list is better is that too-many-tabs is a terrible idea. It is. They say because we have so many preferences, it's better to make a list. It's not. Tabs are inherently *better* UI than a list but, unfortunately, they don't scale well. The problem is not with the UI, it's with the number of preferences we have in the UI, which in itself is a problem. What you saw was Phase I of an attempt to improve the UI. By switching to a UI that does not scale well with the number of preferences, it forces us to control the number of preferences presented in the UI. Phase II---killing preferences---was originally to be done after the new status UI was complete, but due to the outrage you caused, I bumped it up to today. Check out the gaim-devel list archives (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=5764816&forum_id=9587) to get the scoop. The goal is to rethink which preferences are useful, and which aren't, and restructure the dialogs into few enough tabs to fit reasonably along the top of the dilaog. You will certainly agree this is the ideal case. Anyway, a few people said the might try to relay this information to you, but a correction in your blog might be nice to quell the number of hate-IMs I'm getting. Then again, I'm sure everyone will have forgotten about it by tomorrow. Hope this clears things up :) -Sean.
It does for me Sean.
Posted by tberman at October 15, 2004 12:32 AM