News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by corndoge on Monday March 06, 2023 @08:42PM (#35050424)
Matrix is working on bringing that world back, and works pretty well, although configuring a homeserver with the necessary bridges is more difficult than pidgin was.
Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by rw_grim on Monday March 06, 2023 @08:48PM (#35050469)
We're still here!! And there's a ton of support for stuff via third party protocols. I know it's not ideal, but things will get easier when Pidgin 3 finally gets closer to a release.

See this page for a list of all the third party protocol support https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...

Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by corndoge on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:28PM (#35051191)
Great to hear it's alive and kicking!
Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by grishka on Monday March 06, 2023 @09:45PM (#35050904)
And there's still not a single decent Matrix client for macOS. Best case you get some ugly-ass QT thing that doesn't work anything like a macOS app would. The official and most featureful Matrix client is even worse than that, it's an electron app, ugh.

The Matrix protocol itself sometimes also leaves much to be desired. It's much more modern than XMPP, that's true, but the fact that you can't send an image with text in a single message is just... How did everyone involved decide that it's reasonable? Did people design the UX on top of a protocol when it should always be done the other way around?

Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by ptman on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @03:11AM (#35052872)
There is a spec change proposal for fixing this: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/253...
Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by Nextgrid on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @07:34AM (#35054613)
It's ironic that out of the non-iMessage chat clients, Facebook Messenger, despite being web-based, is the closest we have to the Apple UI.
Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by grishka on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @09:30AM (#35055719)
Which specific Facebook messenger UI are you talking about? There are two just on the web alone.

The main issue I'm having with every single of the modern IM apps is that they combine the chat list and the chat switcher into a single control. It's part of the overall unfortunate trend of touchscreen-ification of desktop UIs. Tabbed chat windows need to make a comeback, yesterday.

Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by Nextgrid on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @05:11PM (#35061993)
Facebook Messenger on the web looks (or looked? My last encounter with it was in 2017) the closest to a native iOS/macOS client even to this day: https://i1.wp.com/ensegundos.do/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/m...
Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by grishka on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @01:53PM (#35073189)
This still has the problem of touchscreen-ification. I'm talking more about this sort of thing: https://i.imgur.com/uRkrpb0.png, this example isn't the best (the UI is confusing and too cryptic), but you get the idea. Separate window with chat/contact list, separate tabbed window with chats themselves.
Re:Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin by xorcist on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @06:05AM (#35053991)
In practice it's mostly whatever Jabber had, which is mostly whatever libpurple has.

We're not really moving forward with the proprietary chat protocols (Slack, Teams, Whatsapp). It is a much, much harder problem to solve than MSN and Yahoo ever was.