Thoughts on status in 1.5

I've now been playing with 1.5 for a week or so, giving some of my 
thoughts on the changes in the software some time to gel.

First of all... WOW. Some outstanding work is evident in this 
release! My thanks to everyone who's had a hand, even a small one, in 
the evolution of Fire over the last four years.

I was very pleased with the advent of the floating yellow tool-tip 
status info when hovering over a buddy name in the Buddies window, a 
couple of releases ago. Seeing the details of an away message that 
easily is very valuable.

When I started trying out 1.5 and saw that the user's AIM profile had 
been added to that, I thought, "Great! Now I don't need Get Info to 
see the user's profile!" But, this has evolved into, "Yuck, how do I 
turn this off?" Once I've seen someone's profile once, I rarely need 
to see it again, and I know I can always go dig it up. I've looked 
for a preference to turn off the profile display, unsuccessfully. 
This is valuable, so I won't suggest killing it outright... but 
please make it optional.

Oddly, a couple of users with a long profile have their floating 
yellow tool-tip displays leak off the top of my screen! This means I 
can see the bottom of their profile, but not their current away 
status. I'd be happy to identify such an individual user to someone 
off-list upon request; it seems to happen reliably with at least one 
particular person.

Last but not least, I like the ability to see status changes for my 
buddies displayed in active chat windows... but I'd also really like 
the option to turn this off. Turning it off on a per-user basis would 
be great, but being able to turn it off wholesale would be fine. It's 
valuable to know when someone has left for the afternoon, but this 
feature quickly becomes frustrating with buddies who come and go 
every few minutes, going idle and coming back, going for coffee and 
coming back, etc. The worst of all was my brother, whose iChat is set 
to reflect what he's currently listening to in iTunes. I REALLY don't 
need this info displayed over and over again in the chat window every 
time the song changes.


==========================================================================
  Mark H. Anbinder, Vice President  |                        mha-/mqabDFo/[email protected]
  Public Communications Inc.        |                http://www.14850.com/
==========================================================================


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