RE: [JDEV] Renaming

[Max Metral]

Title:

That would totally bite for people who have 70 buddies and use many machines...  Even now I can't use msn interop because it would take like an hour to set it up.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jens Alfke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 1:16 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [JDEV] Renaming

On Friday, May 4, 2001, at 08:12 PM, Justin Mecham wrote:

Educate, don't embrace stupidity.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem that existing clients deal with resource names very well. For example, gabber and Jabbernaut just seem to use the name of the app as the resource name, which is pretty useless. In Jabbernaut (dunno about gabber) it is possible to go into a pref dialog and set a different resource name, but most people won't figure this out on their own or understand what it's supposed to be used for.

By contrast, in my [embryonic] client I require the user to enter a resource name the first time the program's run. The modal dialog refers to it as a "location name" and explains what it's used for. The resource name entered is saved as a per-user-per-machine preference. (It can later be edited in the prefs if the user changes her mind.)

Each buddy entry in my client's buddy list also shows the name of the highest priority online resource, so you see "Joe Blow at work" or "Joe Blow at PowerBook" depending on what machine JB is logged in from. Unfortunately, if the buddy's using another client it tends to display something like "Joe Blow at gabber" which is less than useful...

It would be nice if the people working on the other clients could take the time to fix this. It only took me a few minutes to implement my "location name" setup dialog.

—Jens