[OTR-dev] Pidgin plugin development and GUI look

[Ian Goldberg]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 12:25:56PM +0200, hcat at gmx.net wrote:
> Hi everyone.
> 
> I have been interested in OTR in the past but back then missing
> support in various widely used clients prevented me from using it. But
> now the situation seems to be better, with Pidgin, Kopete, Miranda
> Trillian and Gajim supporting OTR.
> 
> Personally I use Pidgin, so I'm testing with the 3.1.0 plugin ATM. I'm
> wondering if there has been any development on the Pidgin plugin since
> the last release (and I did not find any public SVN etc). I'm mostly
> wondering about the integration into Pidgin's GUI and the user
> interaction.
> 
> For example, the OTR "button" is drawn for any protocol I use ATM. For
> protocols where I do not have generated a key, it should probably not
> be shown. Also, this "button" takes a lot of space and I'm wondering
> if it could be made more compact or even be moved to the chat toolbar?
> 
> Finally I'm wondering about the icons. The current set of icons is
> based on the old Gaim icon and does not really fit the style of Pidgin
> (which uses Tango icons). What icons do other clients use for the OTR
> states? IMHO it would be important to have the same metaphor for those
> states on different clients. Each client would then implement the
> official metaphor in it's own art style (e.g. Tango look for Pidgin).

Funny you should ask.  ;-)

We're just in the final stages of putting a 3.2.0 preview out.  The
main user interface changes include moving the OTR button to the menu
bar (though the button remains an option), support for multiple
buddies merged into a single contact / conversation window, improved
authentication user interface (based on the user study we did, to appear
in SOUPS 2008), and the icons being changed to Tango-based ones.

My goal is to get it all into a state where it can be put in the public
CVS on sourceforge sometime this week.  Then we'll wait a bit for some
feedback, and for the various translators to supply translations for the
new UI strings, and we'll send it out.

   - Ian