Woo! iChat! Seriously.. I do!
I'm using iChat at the moment. This application is about a million times better than any IM client I've ever used. Its smooth, well designed and nice to look at. Which is kind of what I should have expected since it was designed by apple. In fact it makes you wish more people used AIM.
Hell it makes me wish it supported more than just AIM and Rendezvous. This application would seriously rock if it worked cross clients but that might bulk up what is on the whole a very tasty and compact application.
I was using Fire.app for ICQ/MSN conversations, sadly lots of my friends are going with MSN *wretch*. ICQ support is probably quite easy to implement but MSN has crappy code written aaaaaaall over it.
Anyway I'd still be left out of conversations with Richard, Ben and Andrew. As everyone else I know on MSN uses more than 1 client
It has to be said if I had to use MSN all day I'd go mad. The mac front end program is nicely written but its UI looks like a 3 year old designed it. Its supposed to be somewhere in the middle between the stylish, elegant and drop dead gorgeous Aqua and Microsoft's hashed together (and hastily renamed when the found out what apple were calling their look) "luna" which I believe is the code word for "Fisher-Price".
What results is a hideous amalgamn of translucency and fat, crappy buttons.. I mean the Send button is like 3/4 of the window size!! The menu bar is twice the height of any bar in any application and although I can just about put up with it on my 17" LCD at the flat (and only just mind, given how well designed most other macintosh GUIs are) but on my iBook it hogs ACRES of space which it simply doesn't need I tend to get pissed off when 3/4 of the crap on an application is unusable eye-candy. A lot of people don't seem to get that apple can make a beautiful application but also have nothing which is a waste of space. No other instant messaging application takes up that much room, its just microsoft's complacency because they don't need to worry that PC users will care what their applications will look like because half of them are too lazy to drag their mouse away from the pre-bundled applications.
No flames incidentally, please =] Its the truth, so sayeth the American Courts of Justice =] Read the trial reports folks. That's what Microsoft was found guilty of and its just a shame to see them use that as an excuse for bad design ethic on the macintosh platform.
Posted by John Swaine at January 30, 2003 08:22 PM