[OTR-dev] Pidgin plugin development and GUI look

[hcat at gmx.net]

> I wanted at least some help text that doesn't entail going to the web.
> You're suggesting just having "What's this?" open the HTML widget
> directly, with the current first-level text as its first paragraph?

I didn't realize that it embeds a HTML widget. I just don't see the need for two expanders here, if a user really wants some help text he/she will most likely open the second expander as well, just to see what's written there.

> It's the stock INFO icon.  The stock authentication icon is a lock, and
> a lock just really doesn't convey what's going on here, in my opinion.

Ah... yeah that's theme dependent. GTK uses a lock, GNOME icon theme uses some kind of a keyring. "Info" hmm...

> Hmm.  The original pngs *do* have a transparent background.  The
> background in your image isn't in fact white; it's the background colour
> of the menu bar.  Might this be a bug in how GTK handles menus labelled
> by icons (an admittedly unusual case)?

I just ran a few more tests with different GTK themes and engines and it looks like most are affected. Only the very basic ones display "correctly"... Not sure if this is a GTK or engine bug though.

> Ah, it's because you can group buddies into contacts, and all buddies
> from a single contact show up in the same conversation window.  So we
> need some way to show that there are multiple conversations going on at
> the same time, and they may have different OTR statuses.  Try picking
> different things from your "Send To" menu; you'll see the single OTR
> menu (representing the "current" conversation), but multiple icons
> (representing all conversations, labelled by who you're talking to).
> Indeed, it's unfortunate that clicking it does nothing.  If anyone knows
> a way to make that menu item not highlight at all, I'd love to do that.
> [But making it inactive causes it to grey out so much that I found it
> unreadable.]
I understand this now, but I take it for a bad sign that I was not able to get the meaning myself. But indeed not easy to solve...

> We left the button available for people who want something like this.
> Do you think this is vitally important?  (Do most people leave that
> toolbar visible at all?)
I didn't know the toolbar can be disabled... IMHO the old button takes a way too much space. Integrating the OTR status into the toolbar (like http://blog.pesa.se/2007/09/25/goodbye-big-bloated-otr-button/) doesn't change the pidgin UI too much but still shows the OTR status very nicely.

Cheers,
-Michael
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