GoogleTalk, part I (first steps, general setup)

For several years in a row, as an IM client, I used multiprotocol and multiplatform Pidgin and did not know much grief. The software was constantly evolving, bugs were fixed, new features were added, and less and less it was necessary to dance with a tambourine when setting up for yourself.

But the last few releases bring solid disappointments, small bugs are accumulating, some features are not satisfied, etc. I get annoyed. Nevertheless, I still haven’t seen any alternatives for myself (Miranda and other qip'y are swept aside as a class - well, I don’t like them!). And the full migration to Linux / MacOS was postponed indefinitely. So it was necessary to make a willful life under Windows more pleasantly.

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 learning software, because the first part came out a little chaotic. All problems that have not been resolved / addressed in this part are discussed in the next two.

So,

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

No tabs

The problem was partially solved. I accidentally discovered that it is possible to imitate vertical tabs: once we click on the title of the conversation window, the window is minimized, we bring the window of another conversation under it and it sticks to the minimized one. Considering that GTalk very well remembers the location and size of the windows, I built for myself a “column” of four conversations - usually this is how much I have openly.

Only one line of text input

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

... move to the next line

Both Ctrl + Enter and Enter work in the same way, i.e. send a message. And I like to make lists ... Ok. For now, let's leave.

ICQ / AIM integration

Oops, GTalke integrated in Gmail has long been able to communicate with ICQ / AIM contacts. And in the desktop version is not. 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 unsolved problems .

Fonts

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

Time stamps

Not. At all. And they are sometimes useful. Oh, stop, there are grayish type letters that appear unevenly during a conversation
"Sent at 3:31 AM on Monday"
basically solve the situation.

Usernames

Most often, I save the names of contacts in the form of GT.Ivan Veselov.spb (sorry, Vano, sho palyu *))) )
GT = GoogleTalk (or ICQ, MSN, J, respectively, the protocol), then the name / nickname then the city. But not the point. And 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 title of the window and the contact list is shown correctly. Those. not soaring, but not very nice. I had to replace the points with underscores.

Conversation Themes

There are quite a lot of them, but they are rather poor in each of them at least something, but they are not satisfied. And strongly resemble Skype / Gizma. Fick knows who licked someone from someone, but as far as I understood, after digging into % $ LOCAL_APPDATA% \ Google \ Google Talk \ themes \ , all these things should be easily edited using the html / css file edit. I have stopped at the Bubble Picture .

Voice mail

It works very well. I feel that if this program remains on my hard, I will use it all the time. I use now constantly

Call

Voice calls due to the lack of the presence of non-sleeping people-users of Google Desktop, could not be verified, but judging by the meager size of voice mail files and the rather good sound quality, everything should work fine.

Conclusion:

Even in a practically unexplored / unconfigured form, there is a very pleasant both outwardly and in circulation soft-hardware (seven pluses and three minuses). And if you succeed in painlessly overtaking it also with asechny contacts, you get a wonderful combine, from which you can also call *)))

Everything turned out about it in the following parts

// Original is here

Already ready GoogleTalk, part II (ICQ transports & some tips)