an IM client that's not totally broken?

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 6:46 PM, Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org> wrote:
> On 03/29/2010 06:53 PM, Gmail wrote:
>> Hi,
>> After you start Pigin , right click the panel application button and
>> select "always on top" this tip should help for now.
>
> It does help, but it's not something I want to do every time I launch
> the application. The IM software itself should do it.
>
> Also, there seems to be a weird interaction with focus-follows-mouse and
> the IM discussion windows tends to "steal" the characters I'm typing
> (lots of "sorry, wrong window" apologies I need to send).
>
> This is what the ideal behavior should be:
>
> When there's a new message coming in, that starts a new discussion, pop
> a new window on top of everything else, but don't steal focus.
>
> When a new message is coming in within an existing discussion, raise the
> discussion window but don't steal focus.
>
> All this must be configurable within the application.

All I can say to this is that what you want out of our chat app is
very strange-sounding to me, and since I and millions of others are
happily using Pidgin on Ubuntu, other Linuxes and Windows, and find it
a great little program, I think it's your requirements that are out of
step with most of the rest of the world.

I have used quite a number of multiprotocol chat apps - Pidgin,
Empathy, Kopete, Trillian, Miranda, Fire, Adium & others - together
with the standalone client apps that are offered by all the services
you see in my .sig, below. I've never met anything with a function to
pop up on top of other windows but not steal focus. I can see why not
- it would drive me insane to have chat windows popping up in front of
whatever I am doing.

So I think it's very wrong of you to call chat apps without your
unusual preferences "broken", not to mention downright rude to the
developers of Empathy and Pidgin, who have given you their work for
nothing.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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