GoogleTalk, part I (first steps, general setup)

    For several years in a row, as an IM client, I used multi-protocol and multi-platform Pidgin and did not know much grief. Softina was constantly evolving, bugs were fixed, new features were added, less and less it was necessary to dance with a tambourine when tuning for yourself.

    But the last few releases bring continuous disappointment, small bugs accumulate, some features are not satisfied, etc. I'm annoyed. Nevertheless, I still have not seen an alternative for myself (Miranda and other qip's are marked as a class - well, I don’t like them!). And the full migration to Linux / MacOS was postponed indefinitely. So it was necessary by a strong-willed decision to make your life under Windows more pleasant.

    About a year and a half or two ago, I was already looking in the direction of GTalk, but then it seemed to me too miserable. To date, the situation has not changed much outwardly, but, nevertheless, it now looks like a more “modified file”.

    This post was written in the process of studying software, so the first part came out somewhat messy. All problems that have not been resolved / reviewed in this part are addressed in the next two.

    So,

    What at first glance like / dislike and what to do about it:



    No tabs


    The problem has been partially resolved. I accidentally discovered that you can simulate vertical tabs: once we click on the title of the conversation window, the window minimizes, we bring a window for another conversation under it and it sticks to the minimized one. Given that GTalk remembers the location and size of windows very well, I built a “column” of four conversations for myself - usually this is how much I have open.


    Just one line of text input


    Oh God! It does not scale! Oh, stop, when typing, it starts to increase. This is good, but ...

    ... go to the next line


    Both Ctrl + Enter and Enter work the same way, i.e. send a message. And I like to make lists ... Okay. Let's leave it for now.

    ICQ / AIM integration


    Oops, in GTalke integrated into Gmail there is a long possibility to communicate with ICQ / AIM contacts. But in the desktop version, no. The forums offer strange solutions, such as transports that are always buggy and using Psi as a crutch. So far, this is the most important of the unresolved issues .

    Fonts


    I love that the contacts (of which there are many) are smaller, and the text in the conversation window is larger. Figwam. Either large or small everywhere and at the same time.

    Time stamps


    Not. At all. And they are sometimes useful. Oh, stop, there is - greyish inscriptions like
    “Sent at 3:31 AM on Monday” that non-uniformly appear during the conversation
    basically solve the situation.

    Usernames


    Most often, I save the names of contacts in the form of GT.Ivan Veselov.spb (sorry, Vano, sho pale *))))
    GT = GoogleTalk (or ICQ, MSN, J according to the protocol), then name / nickname then city. But not the point. But the point is that dots are used as a separator . And all that after the first point, GTalk'om mercilessly cut. In this case, the window title and contact list are displayed correctly. Those. not soaring, but not very nice. I had to replace the points with underscores.

    Conversation Topics


    There are quite a lot of them, but they are rather miserable in each, at least something, but they are not happy. And strongly reminiscent of skype / gizmovskie. Fick knows who licked someone, but, as far as I understand, rummaging around in % $ LOCAL_APPDATA% \ Google \ Google Talk \ themes \ , all these things should be edited with the help of editing html / css files. So far I have settled on Bubble Picture .

    Voice mail


    It works in an excellent way. I can smell that if this program remains on my hard, I will use it constantly. I use now constantly

    Call


    It was not possible to check voice calls due to the lack of Google Sleeping Users who are not sleeping on the network, but judging by the meager size of the voicemail files and fairly good sound quality, everything should work fine.

    Conclusion:


    Even in a practically unexplored / unadjusted form, there is a very pleasant and superficially software device (seven pluses and three minuses). And if you manage to overtake ASEC contacts as well painlessly, you get a wonderful combine that you can also call *)))

    Everything turned out, more about that in the following parts

    // Original here GoogleTalk, part II (ICQ transports & some is

    already ready) tips)

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