First of all the obligatory (though entirely honest) gushing praise for the product. You guys make my work so much easier, thank you.
Now to get down to brass tacks: there are two, admittedly minor, problems that have been bugging me for ages, both regarding your tab system. 1) I have a very narrow chat window and my open windows are listed at the top of my window. This means that I usually have more tabs open than can comfortably fit. Fortunately Pidgin crops those off the screen, allowing me to access them with either ctrl+tab or by clicking the tiny arrows left and right of the visible tabs. This is pretty close to my ideal solution, it allows easy access to out-of-sight tabs without distorting my chat window too much. My problem is with the left and right arrow keys (as mentioned before, the ones to the left and right of the visible tabs), which shift the focus of my current window one tab to the left or right on click. This makes absolutely no sense to me. If I wanted to shift focus from one visible tab to another I'd simply be clicking the other tab as it is far more visible and easier to pinpoint than the tiny arrow. The arrow should be shifting the entire selection of visible tabs. To illustrate: I'm talking to Hank, and at the top of my screen I see (all-caps = the tab with focus) <HANK/Jane/Margaret/Tom> If I want to talk to Jeff (who I know is in a tab to the right of Tom), I naturally click >, which I presume will leave me with <DON/Jeff/Lisa/Dolly> With either Don having focus or focus remaining on Hank, either makes some degree of sense. I now have access to four more tabs, with a significant chance of locating and finding the person I'm looking for, all with a single click. Instead, Pidgin gives me <Hank/JANE/Margaret/Tom> Once again, if I wanted to talk to Jane, I'd be clicking Jane, instead of finding the tiny little arrow button and clicking that. If I want to navigate to an invisible tab I have to click the button three more times before finally having just one more tab appear. Slightly more ideal is clicking Tom and then clicking the arrow key, which still leaves me with just one previously invisible tab and at least one superfluous click. In practice the lack of a practical tab searching system means I often switch back to my buddy list and finding a user there, even though I know I already have a conversation with that person open, simply because it's faster than ctrl+tabbing my way through 10+ tabs one by one. 2) When I have a new message waiting for me in a tab, the tab title turns blue. When I open that tab and view the contents, the title switches back to black. I love that. The simple and intuitive visualization is obvious without being obtrusive. What I don't get is why that can't be implemented for 'user is typing' and 'user has stopped typing'. Respectively, these states change the title color to yellow and green. However, if I click the tab, thereby acknowledging the change in state, the title remains yellow or green! Only if the other user submits his message (turning the title blue) does the system allow me to revert the message title to black. This wouldn't be a significant problem if all messages ever started were also submitted within a reasonable time-frame. However, in my less than ideal world users often start typing something, think better of it, and end up responding hours later (if at all). This leaves me with a green/yellow warning title that constantly catches my eye and triggers a curious 'hey, did I get a new message?' response without actually providing new info. In short; please revert the message title to black after I open a window in which a user is typing/has stopped typing. In conclusion: love you guys, great product, keep up the good work, and thanks in advance for anything you could do to help me out with my horrific first world problems.
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