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Comment by Cknight70 | Hacker News Reader

Something I'll miss about AIM and older chat clients is how compact they were. Most of these newer chat programs seem to assume you're going to have their application take up the entire screen.

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Yes, and will continually bloat with upgrades since "computers get faster, what's the problem?" (See: Electron platform.)

The main AIM client was notorious for this itself (at least in the 2000s when I used it), ads, growing installation size, bloat "features", etc.

It's what pushed a lot of users to use alternate clients or stick with old versions.

Or install "AIM Ad Hack". Ahhh Nostalgia.

Most modern audio players have the same issue. WinAmp/XMMS took up very little of your screen, while most modern players will assume that full screen is what you want.

That's the reason I'm still using Winamp. Its aged surprisingly well and it has more features than a lot of modern media players.

It really whips the llama's ass.

There's also http://aimp2.us/, which, AFAIR, in some respects whips Winamp's ass. Sadly nothing comparable to either on Linux.

Winamp 2 or 5?

Version 5 kinda sucks.

Maybe its because I don't know what I'm missing, but I didn't start using Winamp until version 5, and I think its great. Sure it has a lot of unnecessary or even broken features (looking at you audio converter), but those are easy to ignore and you can even remove some of them.

This is one of the (few?) things that iTunes gets right. Though it's a little hidden, the entire program can be minimized into a small floating album cover.

And if that's not small enough, you can minimize it altogether and just get updates and controls via Notification Center.

Vox on MacOS does this by default. Very simple/fast/small music player.

Foobar2k on Windows and Deadbeef on Linux seems to do much the same job of playing music while staying minimal.

Sorry, but I see nothing minimal in their screenshots [0]. Same iTunes for my taste. I do believe the performance footprint is minimal, but that't not the first aspect for an everyday app.

[0] http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/screenshots/0.6/screenshots....

They need all that room for ads.

One thing I hate about most IM clients is the buddy/friend/roster list runs in a separate window from actual chat sessions.

I much prefer the one window paradigm of IRC.

Funny, I'm the exact opposite. Most of the chat programs I use (or have used) use the combined approach. Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and so on all have the "buddy list" permanently attached to the conversation window such that you can only see a single conversation at a time. I prefer the MDI of yore since I can have multiple conversations open at once (on desktop, I realize this isn't feasible on mobile).

What chat apps use separate windows? The only one I can think of is Steam.

Pretty much every older chat program used this at some point including Google chat, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Pidgin, and even Skype.

True. This is probably due to the fact that many applications are "ported" from the web and web does not grok floating windows.

Good point! Perhaps it's a holdover from smartphone chat apps, most of which were designed full-screen.

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