"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructiona...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:iqbjs4$2vrm$1...@digitalmars.com... > Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> I've actually come close to making my own IM client out of >> frustration, but libpidgin was a pain > > Hah, I started one as well, with only aim support. It actually kinda > works (and written in D), but I keep changing my D gui stuff around > (this program is one of the D Windowing System test apps, which > changes then stagnates then changes then is tabled then changes...) > that it's not really usable. > > I basically settled for gaim 1.5 with a few modifications. > Annoyingly, bugs have crept in as the stupid gtk or glib updates > and gaim doesn't, but I know it's limits so if it crashes when > I close a tab, I just don't close tabs like that. > > > Gaim is one of those programs that went to pure crap with a new > version though. Pidgin, gaim 2.0, is just utterly unusable to me. >
I found it basically usable (back when there were actually other people on it ;) ), but it's inability to use the default away message, or even just log in, without it sitting there first doing nothing but waiting for a custom message that I'd never type in annoyed the hell out of me. There were a few other annoyances, too, like how the table in the "saved statuses" screen sets the vertical-align of each cell to middle instead of top. (I hate it when web pages do it, and now a desktop app is doing it, too?) It might be better for me though, because I run it on windows, so I rarely have GTK getting updated behind Pidgin's back. I could come up with a huge list of programs that just get worse with newer releases...iTunes, FireFox, pretty much anything from Adobe, Windows (post-XP anyway), Nero, Roxio, KDE3->KDE4, Azureus->Vuze, McAffee (It's hard to imagine there was ever a time it wasn't worse than the disease), Visual Studio, id Software FPSes after Doom 2 (although they didn't actually reach "bad" until Q3A), all just off the top of my head. >> Lol, or maybe I'll go back to blackbox ;) > > Blackbox rocks. It's what I used as my starting point. Actually, > my custom WM is a fairly short diff from blackbox. It's biggest > shortcoming, but that's a gift as well as a curse - it leaves > the door open to put in a customized one! > Yea, I used Blackbox a little bit when I first tried Linux ten years ago. It held it's own pretty well against the alternatives. >> Unfortunately, I don't have the time or patience to do any heavy >> customizing/configuring. If I did, I might not have been driven >> away from Linux when I first tried it ten years ago. > > What happened with me is I kinda locked myself into it. Switching > away would be an even bigger hassle due to moving files and such, > so I stuck with it, slowly excising the worst of the suck. > > The thing that still pisses me off beyond belief is something I > can't fix myself - interoperability, the topic of this thread. > > (see I'm still on topic!) Heh :) And then I go mercilessly killing the topic ;)