about empathy as the default IM application

[Asif Youssuff]

On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 17:36 -0400, Danny Piccirillo wrote:
> IMHO Empathy is great for most users, especially new ones, and it can
> replace poth pidgin AND ekiga. It lacks the basic features like the
> ones you mentioned, but i don't think they are showstoppers and
> including it in Karmic or the next release i'm sure would guarantee
> that all of those would be resolved within the release cycle.

I've been playing with Empathy for a while, and it has an extremely
annoying behavior -- when a message is received from a person without an
open conversation open, the alert comes up in the notification area, and
does not spawn a new window -- this is unlike any other IM application I
have ever used. 

Why do i need to click on the icon when in Pidgin (or other IM apps), I
can simply switch to the new conversation tab? Having to move my hand
from the keyboard is extremely annoying in this case. 

Also, most of the time, I don't even notice that I have a new
conversation, since I don't look at the notification area often -- this
means that friends can leave messages, and leave before I have the
chance to respond, simply because I never noticed that i received an IM,
even though I was actively using the application.

I filed a bug report, and didn't get a friendly response, sadly. 

        http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=585914

The response I got was "we don't popup a window in the face of the user
to not steal focus" -- you can read the bug report for more. 

So for me, empathy is NOT ready to replace pidgin, as it presents a
usability regression for me.

-Asif