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comments?
10/13/2000 06:15:58 AM
[comment]
Something else, while we're on the subject of AIM clients. I just noticed that, when the AOL network service is down and you try to launch the app, you get a popup warning message that explains that the service is currently unavailable, and offers buttons both to dismiss the message and also to retrieve "More Information...," which, when clicked, launches your Web browser of choice and sets it spinning.
"Brilliant," I thought to myself, "AOL is sending me to a page where they will have a timely explanation of the problem, and an estimation of how long it will take for their server to recover. What a wonderful idea."
Unfortunately, however, it just took me to the homepage of AOL.com, which was next to useless. So AOL is stupid. But it's still a great idea for people building desktop apps that require some sort of present network functionality.
10/12/2000 03:18:12 AM
Ideally, AIM clients would evolve to include 2 fairly important conversational context indicators:
- They would add in some mechanism for visually indicating the age of the last text string sent. So, for example, if I IM (and let's fix that particularly tounge-twisted construction, while we're at it) Courtney, and she doesn't respond because she's away from her desk, and then she returns to her desk, she should be able to look at my sentence and know that I typed it, say, an hour ago -- so she would know that I was in a different head space, that perhaps some degree of conversational context needed to get re-established. Think of the number of times that IM conversations you've had have stumbled over this particular issue in some way -- it's not a big deal, but it does impede the natural flow of the conversation. It's so obviously clunky. Perhaps the text could start out fully black and then fade to gray incrementally as the minutes/half hours/hours passed. This would be far more effective, visually, spatially, and cognitively, than those friggin' annoying timestamps.
Along these lines, there should also be some sort of facility for quickly recalling the last text string the other person sent, to solve for that annoying "I closed that window ages ago, and this person is responding to something I've said, and I have no idea what that was." I think the PC version of ICQ might have something along these lines -- although I want something that I can call up and then dismiss with a single click, if even that -- but I don't know for sure because I'm not on a PC, and the blinky, annoying, overstuffed interface for ICQ sucks so incredibly badly these days anyway.
- This one's a little trickier -- we've gotta come up with some sort of IM-specific conversational standard for beginning and ending conversations. I know these sorts of things are evolved, not imposed, but there's something so inherently limiting about current IM clients (and who knows? maybe IM in general) that nothing even remotely valuable has evolved yet along these lines. And don't tell me that "you there?" and "cya" are the answer. There's gotta be something better we can do -- something, again, that enhances rather than derails the natural flow of the conversation. Such as it is.
What I get from this is that it's the starting and stopping that's always the most difficult part. Gracefully, anyway. The truth of this probably extends well-past instant messenging.
Is Jabber -- which appears to be the most forward-thinking, albeit technically- rather than socially-bent, IM setup/standard out there -- doing anything of this sort?
10/11/2000 07:20:21 AM
The American educational system has failed me miserably.
10/9/2000 02:39:04 AM
I will be in Dusseldorf for the next two and a half weeks. Go me!
10/4/2000 12:01:49 PM
Once they let me turn off anti-aliasing for all fonts 14 points and below in size, I'm all over Mac OS X.
10/3/2000 04:09:05 PM
I'm just going to nominate the Dirty Three's Horse Stories (1996) as the greatest album ever. Especially track 4, "I Remember a Time When Once You Used to Love Me." Rhythmic punk violin never sounded so sweet.
7/26/2000 11:38:00 AM
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