We’ve made some major improvements to the tab completion of nicknames in IRC channels (and other chatrooms). The goal, as always, is to make it “just work” (so you can think about more important things!).

Simply press TAB to complete the first couple of letters you have typed:

To undo the completion, just press Backspace as usual.

If there is no unique nick that fits the bill, Instantbird tries to guess which nick you mean from the context. For example, if you have recently been pinged by someone, that nick is preferred. Otherwise it just completes as much as possible, and shows you a list of alternative completions:

You can then always press TAB again to cycle through these candidate nicks until you get the right one:

(Shift+TAB will cycle through the list in the opposite direction.)

Notice how Instantbird automatically added a colon after the nick, as we were addressing someone at the start of a message. And if you add another nick, you get a comma-separated list:

Of course, sometimes that may not be what you intended. So if you delete the trailing colon by pressing Backspace, the punctuation adjusts accordingly:

Don’t forget you can also reply to any message by double-clicking it! This will add the sender’s nick to the beginning of the message.

Another very visible change between Instantbird 0.2 and 0.3 is the possibility to set a user icon and a display name.

You will see a place holder icon at the top of the buddy list, just click it (this will open a file picker) to set an icon. The icon will be automatically resized and converted to fit the various size and format requirements of the IM networks you use.

Similarly, click the “Display name” place holder to edit it. This name will be visible in your contacts’ buddy lists (unfortunately this currently works only for MSN).

Here you go, your friends will now easily recognize you:

Conversation windows have also been changed to display your contacts’ icons and some more information (display name, status message, …):

I can already hear some comments about how much space this new information bar takes (or wastes) in all conversation windows. Yes, this takes a lot of space, we know. People tend to use big or very big windows for chatting (sometimes even full screen!) but if you like the ability to chat in small windows, don’t worry, we love you too! Just resize the window and this information bar will shrink to ensure you still see the actual content of the conversation:

And for very small conversation windows, the bar will completely disappear, leaving only the strictly necessary user interface:

The contact list was identified as a weak area of Instantbird 0.2. It has been dramatically improved for Instantbird 0.3 which we plan to release next week.

The surprise and enthusiasm of a few people about the “magic copy” feature I mentioned briefly at the end of my previous post introducing time bubbles reminded me that we forgot to introduce this feature when it landed for Instantbird 0.2 as part of our implementation of the Adium message theme system.

We decided to use this theme system because it seemed nice overall and was already used by a few other clients as well. However there was something we really didn’t like: using a customized message theme could make copied data from the conversation really hard to read, to the point that it would be unsuitable for sending a quote via email.

As this may not be very clear yet, let me give an example:

This is the text we get when copying the selection to the clipboard and pasting it. This is without our “magic copy” feature of course.

I should also note that the Bubbles theme used for this screenshot is not the worst in this regards. I’ve seen in the description of some themes (not designed for Instantbird) that they were “clipboard friendly”, which indicates the theme author took this problem into account and probably had to make some trade-offs between the visual appearance and the usability of copied conversations.

As we were not satisfied with this situation (which either makes copying from the conversation poorly usable or restricts theme authors’ creativity), we developed a different system that instead of serializing the selected HTML attempts to detect which messages are selected, and to “prettyprint” them based on what Instantbird knows about the message, rather than what is visible and selected.

This is the result:

If only a part of a single message was selected, the username and timestamp won’t be added to the copied strings, it will behave like a normal text copy:

As we detect which messages are selected and even know if each message was fully selected or only in part, we can nicely add an ellipsis when a message was cut:

This even works when using multiple-selections (press Ctrl on Windows/Linux, and Command on Mac to do this):

A few technical details: the template used to serialize copied messages is both localizable and customizable from about:config, it’s also possible to completely turn off this feature in case it ever causes some trouble (look for the messenger.conversations.selections.* family of preferences in about:config).

This feature has been turned on by default in Instantbird for over a year and nobody complained about it. Actually, it’s one of the features that is barely noticed because it just works, but it is something that is really missed if using another IM client after using Instantbird for a while.

Instantbird 0.2 was released with Bubbles as its default message theme:

The most common feedback we received from users that quickly switched back to Simple (the previous default) or another theme was that the lack of timestamp for each message made the theme unusable.

Some users have really passionate opinions about whether these timestamps should be shown or not. On one hand, people think it’s a useful piece of information that should always be visible, but on the other hand, people think it’s a waste of space on their limited screens. The common “solution” to this problem is to include a “show timestamp” preference, allowing each user to decide for themselves which of the two behaviors is the least inconvenient.

I don’t think that making the user responsible for choosing between two not-so-good options which one is best is a good way to address this issue. So soon after the 0.2 release, I started searching for better solutions.

I tried to identify what the information provided by message timestamps was used for, so that we could hopefully find something appropriate for the actual needs.

The starting points of my reflection were that:

• timestamps, when visible, are most of the time ignored.
• when they are actually read, the information they provide is rarely the information really desired, but only an indirect way to answer a valid question.

So then, I tried to identify which questions users who wanted to have their timestamps visible all the time had to answer. Here are the questions I found, and what I’ve implemented to provide human friendly answers to these questions:

Context menus (opened with a “right click”) are a common and expected part of the user interface. It can be very frustrating when they are missing, so in Instantbird 0.2 we tried to add one wherever users are likely to expect one.

In the buddy list, the context menu of contacts can be used to start a conversation (although pressing enter or double clicking is usually faster), show the conversation history, rename a contact, move the contact to a different group or remove it from the list:

The context menu is usable anywhere in the buddy list to toggle the display of offline buddies:

A context menu was added in the account manager too. There, it proposes all the possible actions for an account. Since Instantbird 0.2, it’s possible to reorder the accounts in the list (this is also possible with drag & drop using the mouse or with the keyboard using shift + the up or down arrow).

A context menu is available on conversation tabs, with actions related to that tab (opening it in a new window, closing it, …) and to the conversation, like showing the history of previous conversations with the same contact.

Last but not least, there’s a context menu in conversation content. This is the most “contextual” context menu we have added. The proposed actions will vary depending on whether there is a selection or if the context click was done over a link.

When selecting some text from a conversation, a common action is to copy it to the clipboard and then paste it in a browser to use it as the query in search engine. We have included search engine items directly in the context menus to reduce the number of clicks needed for this common case.

In Instantbird 0.2 a lot of visual bloat has been removed from all windows. Some margins have been reduced, borders that weren’t useful for clarity have been removed, and alignments have been improved. All of this contributes to a better use of the available space on the screen, and to a better perceived impression of simplicity in the user interface.

To illustrate this, let’s compare the conversation window before and after:

The buddy list has also been improved:

The status can now be changed directly from the top of the buddy list instead of having to interact with a poor popup dialog. (Note that for the users who hate clicking, the status can also be changed quickly using commands from conversation windows: /away /dnd /back /offline.)

The account manager has also been simplified a lot, and is now usable in a much smaller window: