Hacker News Reader

Comment by hestefisk | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a chat application with Teams that is actually /usable/. I really miss the days of Pidgin. Fun fact: the KDE / Linux client for MSN had a feature whereby it would notify me (by opening a window) if someone had clicked on my profile in MSN Messenger and started typing a message, but not yet sent it. It was a really nice way of freaking regular MSN Messenger users out.

I cannot remember what the name of the application was but it was very handy.

View on HN

A lot of thirdparty clients did that, and it's a natural consequence of the protocol relying on creating sessions (ephemeral chat rooms is a good description of what they're like), which its participant(s) are notified of being added to prior to the first message being sent; but the official client just keeps track of the session creations and doesn't actually indicate any activity in a session until a message is sent.

Yeah we're trying to tackle the usability stuff in Pidgin 3. Unfortunately due to API guarantees we just can't make the changes people want in purple2/pidgin2, so it is what it is. We are nearing an alpha soon (tm) (no date set) but they goal is to have basic pidgin 2 functionality with the ability to add all the new features.

I have a public blog post on my patreon that goes into some more detail if you're interested. https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-were-with-3-78291546

Can't wait to see what Pidgin 3 is going to be like.

How bad are the API changes? Will people be able to use existing libpurple implementations?

It's essentially a brand new program/library now.

There were a bunch of apps back in the day that could hook into MSN Messenger to provide a whole bunch of functionality like this. It could tell you when people closed their chat windows.

Kopete? I also remember some Linux MSN clients at the time actually told you when some contact closed the conversation window. That was really cool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com