I use Pidgin and Spark at work, Adium at home, and used to use Trillian.
What I wanted in terms of customizations was: minimalist skin; transparency; absolute control over fonts and smileys. Trillian offered all of these. Trillian had some problems with XMPP servers like OpenFire, though (or at least I could not configure it correctly) so I can't use it anymore. However if it works I recommend it for control. (if you do want the minimalist theme I believe it was called something unappealing like "WinME": it basically looks like a Win9x window)
Pidgin is.. okay. Not quite as customizable, but it does cover transparency and fonts, and multiple connections. I have had trouble where occasionally it barfs and deletes all of my settings, including server configurations, but not often.
A lot of people love Adium. I find it passably tolerable in a pinch but otherwise annoying. That said, I rarely IM from home so have not played with it much.
Spark is the tool that will soon be standard. It replaces the MSN IM client, which sucks.
Spark seems like a decent-enough client, if only I could either get it to honor the Windows color scheme or configure colors by hand. The screaming white background, and the light-gray text in the contacts list, are problems for me. (The white hurts my eyes and I can't read the gray text -- it's too light.)
How do I set skins in Trillian? The doc and the UI disagree; I do not have a "choose" option. If the answer is that I need to download some first, where do I put them? (The doc seems to be silent on this.)
I found no way to control Spark showing smileys or control the font, both of which are important to me. The colours irritate me too.
Hmm. I don't have any computers with Trillian on them anymore, but you do need to download them separately and extract the zip files into the main directory (or the skins/ directory under it), and restart. The skins I tried varied, but most had a readme in the zip file.
you do need to download them separately and extract the zip files into the main directory (or the skins/ directory under it)
Thank you! That did it. (No readme file with the skin I downloaded as an experiment.)
I found ways in Spark to control some of the fonts. You can set size for active contacts (but not offline ones, which is weird) and the chat window, but not the search box or profiles. You can't set colors on any of that, and I don't think you can set font face. (The default font face is ok with me, so I haven't looked.)
If you wanted to invest the time and effort, we can grab the source for Spark, and hunt down and kill any reference to a Color or Font object. How hard can it really be? :-)
Re: Spark sourcecellioFebruary 5 2009, 04:09:14 UTC
Worth a try! I should be getting the security variance to install Pidgin tomorrow, but there's definitely value in having the same software available that everyone else uses. (It's only a matter of time before someone finds a feature unique to Spark that we shall depend on...) I'll talk with you tomorrow.
Comments 8
What I wanted in terms of customizations was: minimalist skin; transparency; absolute control over fonts and smileys. Trillian offered all of these. Trillian had some problems with XMPP servers like OpenFire, though (or at least I could not configure it correctly) so I can't use it anymore. However if it works I recommend it for control. (if you do want the minimalist theme I believe it was called something unappealing like "WinME": it basically looks like a Win9x window)
Pidgin is.. okay. Not quite as customizable, but it does cover transparency and fonts, and multiple connections. I have had trouble where occasionally it barfs and deletes all of my settings, including server configurations, but not often.
A lot of people love Adium. I find it passably tolerable in a pinch but otherwise annoying. That said, I rarely IM from home so have not played with it much.
Spark.. bleah. Stay away from it!
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Spark seems like a decent-enough client, if only I could either get it to honor the Windows color scheme or configure colors by hand. The screaming white background, and the light-gray text in the contacts list, are problems for me. (The white hurts my eyes and I can't read the gray text -- it's too light.)
How do I set skins in Trillian? The doc and the UI disagree; I do not have a "choose" option. If the answer is that I need to download some first, where do I put them? (The doc seems to be silent on this.)
Thanks!
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Hmm. I don't have any computers with Trillian on them anymore, but you do need to download them separately and extract the zip files into the main directory (or the skins/ directory under it), and restart. The skins I tried varied, but most had a readme in the zip file.
Reply
Thank you! That did it. (No readme file with the skin I downloaded as an experiment.)
I found ways in Spark to control some of the fonts. You can set size for active contacts (but not offline ones, which is weird) and the chat window, but not the search box or profiles. You can't set colors on any of that, and I don't think you can set font face. (The default font face is ok with me, so I haven't looked.)
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