From: Chris W. <chr...@gm...> - 2005-10-20 23:41:31
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On 10/20/05, Luke Schierer <lsc...@us...> wrote: > I can accept that some people might have come to _some_ of gaim's > protocols without having used any official client. I have trouble > accepting that they will have come to gaim having used _no_ official > client, except perhaps with the case of Jabber or SILC. Why would > you sign up for an MSN account, never having used winMSN, unless it > were as a developer to gaim? I recently signed up to use MSN, simply because MSN is regionally dominant in Quebec, where I have a number of friends. I've never used the MSN client on any real basis, and really don't have any desire to do so :) I signed up for Yahoo for the same reason; and ended up using Jabber/GTalk as well as sametime at work through gaim. > People who have not used _any_ IM, excepting the very young just > coming to computers, in my experience, resist IM very strongly. Thus > I think it a VERY GOOD assumption that any user of gaim has used at > least one official client at some point in their lives. Digressing a bit, this begs the question: is gaim a chat client in its own right, or a dozen different official clients in one? And further, what is more likely to provide a smoother user experience: a program that tries to be a dozen chat clients in one, or a chat client? Anyways. :) I'm always curious about why there are pronouncements about "X must do Y!", or, more usually, "X must not do Y, because it is evil!" Why not let X do Y, but make it easy to ignore? (Or learn about, such as when someone pastes a unix path for the first time and sees "No such command. Try /help") What's wrong with a little choice? This discussion is getting a, ah, little heated. Perhaps we should all take a breath, look around, and realize the world will not end if slash commands [are,are not] included in gaim. Perhaps we haven't found the One True User Interface yet. -Chris |