Adium Redesigned

The drag-and-drop file sharing, with inline preview, is pretty amazing. I wish Adium had that.<p>I really dislike the rest of the UI though. One <i>very</i> important thing about Adium is how compact it is. Even on relatively small laptop screens you can just leave it in a corner, which makes it easy to hold conversations without having to break context.<p>The conversation list, and the conversation views themselves, feel very much like the much-maligned "gigantor" Skype update from a while back. Everything feels much too big, much too spaced out, for a pure utility app. IM isn't an "experience" app, it's about as utilitarian as computer use gets.<p>The "smart command line" thing is very cool though.

Wow, why is there such an unbelievable amount of negativity and trolling about this project? I applaud what Oskar and Dawid are trying to do. Adium is a great project, but its starting to feel a little stale and could use some people experimenting with different UI.<p>I hope Dawid and Oskar find somebody to help them with this experiment and I hope encouragement and constructive feedback start float to the top of this thread. Lets help these guys get help and see what happens!

"Adium Reskinned" is more appropriate. This is a mockup that some designer did that fused (the bad parts of) Messages with the background color on this blog and then posted it on HN.<p>Maybe the designers should learn how to skin Adium and do this? I fail to see why they can't?

I am kinda sick of titles that suggest someone has actually done something more than just create mockups, when really it's just some mockups.<p>We can all make some mockups in an afternoon. It's not really worth telling everybody about unless you've done something, IMHO.

Man, that is an example of graceful degradation, just not what we usually understand this to mean.<p>- Bubbles. Seriously? The 2005's want their failed metaphors back. Thanks, the list-and-icons Adium presents are way more useful<p>- stamp-sized images to disturb the text flow. Great idea, please forget about it right now.<p>Adium is completely unsexy, and this is a good thing. I don't need a chat application to take over my whole screen, this is not Facebook Home.<p>Next up: Terminal.app reborn: output of Unix commands grouped by "conversation" - because is looks so much nicer. Icons for every shell command - much sexier looking.

Uncharitable summary: "We did a mockup that merged the designs for Messages and Skype, and we want that interface for Adium. Someone please implement it for us."

I for one totally hate the layout of iMessage, and skype ... which this seems to be a clone of.<p>I always find myself with both iMessage and Skype having to always check I'm in the correct chat window, this layout to me doesn't automatically say "Hey you're talking to Mike", I have to stop and visually verify each time.<p>Looking at his design, with almost zero contrast, it would be orders of magnitude worse trying to work out which person you chatting to at a glance.<p>I would honesty stop using adium if this become the default UI.

Perhaps this is just me (design tends to be a pretty subjective thing), but I fail to see why it looks terrible. Multi-window makes sense for a small chat window on top of other applications. While the chat window itself could use a little work, not everyone (myself included) likes the iMessage word bubbles. However, making this look pretty should simply be a skin for Adium.

I'd suggest implementing this as its own app—Adium, Pidgin etc. are just front-ends to libpurple, and this could probably be implemented as such, too.

I made a ticket [1] about exactly that with a mockup (which I seem to have deleted from my droplr over that time; though it looked very similar to how iMessages looks now) 2 years ago and the response to the idea was a "no". You should make a ticket yourselves and see if they've changed their minds yet.<p>I'd love to see a single window UI in Adium but just making the mockup and saying how good of an idea it is doesn't seem to be convincing enough for someone to actually tackle the project.<p>[1] <a href="https://trac.adium.im/ticket/14843" rel="nofollow">https://trac.adium.im/ticket/14843</a>

Looks awesome! But not not actually reborn, more of just a concept of how to make it a lot better.<p>Can we, as a community, stop saying "LOOK I MADE SOMETHING" when it is actually just a landing page or mock up?

I was an Adium user for many years but frankly I very much disagree with Messages being bugridden, while assuming Adium is not. In fact Adium took so much work in trying to update it, logging me out randomly of AOL (and then telling me I am logged in on two devices), not showing things on MSN, not transferring images properly etc.

I'd say my no longer using Adium is less about its appearance and more about the fact that it doesn't support iMessage.

This seems like adium reborn as skype to me. I've never understood why the current design trends intend to make larger more robust interfaces to simplistic programs like chat. My ideal chat is something like irssi. It takes up minimal screen real estate, which is priority #1 for me.

Looking again, I'm even more flabbergasted that this is getting any play. The UX is terrible.<p>* It copies the conversation mode in Messages...a terrible feature that ruins the convenience of keeping open only the contacts you want to keep open. <i>Its still multi-window...unless you plan on making me search for contacts. Because typing when your hand is on the mouse is convenient. </i> Nice that I have to click on a contact and bring up their chat window to see their status.<p>I'm irritated because there is nothing innovative or informative about this post.

Personally I think Adium needs a lot of work, both in UI and functionality. I've used it for a long time, but I'm not particularly happy with it without going out of my way to extend it with add-ons, especially when it comes to IRC. Would love to help on a project like this where I could (design, etc).

There aren't enough designers in the open source community, so I love seeing this effort. If someone implements this, perhaps it will encourage other designers to offer suggested UIs to other open source projects (some of which could really use some UI love).

Adium has pretty extensive skinning options- I wonder whether you wouldn't even need to rewrite.

The best thing about Adium is that every conversation can occupy its own little window, taking full advantage of OSX's window system. If you need to chat, the window for that specific conversation is right there to look at. Use exposé and you see all the chats at once.<p>Never do you have to open the monolithic Adium app, then click to the conversation that exists in a different 'folder'(since they use the same concept of Finder's sidebar).<p>I immensely dislike the concept of single window apps in OSX just because you can't dismiss the parts of the app you really don't care about. You can't see more than one portion of it at once, and you can't organise it on your very spacious desktop.

Ob-title-gripe: shouldn't it be "Adium Reconceived"?<p>I expect to see the result in about 9 months.

That's a really nice mock.<p>I started prototyping something along these lines a couple months before Messages was announced. The idea was to make a (commercial) next-generation IM client for the Mac with a more modern UI. I stopped working on it when the first Messages beta was released, figuring that it added most of the UI things I wanted, and that if it shipped with OS X for free, few would want an alternative.<p>Now I wonder if dissatisfaction with Messages is high enough that there's an opportunity again?<p>If you're interested in this stuff and want to talk about it, drop me an email.

That layout will fail if both sides write many short single line posts. You will have to alternate between both sides of the screen all the time and might lose the line on the way.<p>I never got the appeal of the "left and right" movement. I much prefer messages being shown top to bottom without me having to look left and right. I am not updating my SMS app because they switched to that layout and I found it annoying to use.<p>I also find a timestamp on each message useful, much more than whitespace or bubbles.

Please make it happen. Also, please let me hide "buddies" that are in my Google contacts, whose activity I do not want to see but whose contact info I do not want to lose.

I think he means "Messages" UI with different colors.

Adium and Transmission are the only two software that I really miss from OSX. I wish someone would make an equivalent on Windows.

Mockups are just an abstraction of the real thing. There are lots of issues with this mockup that wouldn't translate well when it gets built.<p>Example: the search "box" running directly into the pill buttons.<p>It's a decent mashup of Messages UI with Adium functionality, but that doesn't necessarily make it better.

I've seen a few of these unsolicited redesigns pass through HN, and design specifics aside I like the tone of this post a lot. Who knows how this is going to pan out, but it's a good place to start.<p>Yes. Go forth. Fork.

I'm curious, I know Adium uses a webview to implement their chat window. How would one do this without a webview? that reacts the same (text selection only)? does Messages use a webview as well?

I made a HTML/CSS3 version out of it: <a href="http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/iwIBK" rel="nofollow">http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/iwIBK</a>

No mention about Skype? I'm stuck on this due to business associates and customers demanding it for the past 5 years.<p>Everything else is Messages.

I like it:<p><a href="http://elpassion.pl/adium-concept/adium.html" rel="nofollow">http://elpassion.pl/adium-concept/adium.html</a><p>(nice demo site too)

I don't like the mockup UI he's got on that page. Copied way too much from iMessage which I hate.

I switched from Adium to Messages back when the beta was released and haven't looked back.

Evidently, the UI concept should support both single and multiple window usage patterns.

Hey, I like that, seems pretty... clean. I would totally use that if someone made it :)

Does no one on Mac use Trillian?

what's buggy about iMessage? I haven't had too much trouble with it, at least for SMS and gchat. Then again, I usually use Adium on account of IRC so maybe I just haven't used iMessage enough to run into anything.

Perfect. Love it.

looks 10 million times better, nice work

Please do.