Gwibber by default?

[Matthias Clasen]

On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 23:24 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 04/02/2010 11:17 PM, Luke Macken wrote:
> > The Gwibber deps seem a bit crazy at the moment, especially since we're
> > not even utilizing the desktop couch service for anything else (afaik).
> >
> > Opening and closing Gwibber will launch these services and leave them
> > running behind the scenes:
> >
> >      Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used   Program
> >      ------------------------------------------
> >     536.0 KiB + 582.0 KiB =   1.1 MiB   couchdb (4)
> >       2.2 MiB + 176.0 KiB =   2.4 MiB   couchjs
> >      12.9 MiB + 564.0 KiB =  13.5 MiB   desktopcouch-service
> >      20.1 MiB +   1.1 MiB =  21.2 MiB   gwibber-service
> >      32.8 MiB +   2.2 MiB =  34.9 MiB   beam.smp (2) (erlang)
> >   
> 
> Pino (the latest version in Koji) is written in Vala is much faster than
> Gwibber and consumes much less resources as well in addition to the
> lower number of dependencies.  I have been using Gwibber for a long time
> and recently switched to Pino and love it.

I gave pino a quick spin this afternoon. It is a very young project and
clearly still have some UI warts to shake out, but it seems to be
functional. Some of the things I noticed:

- The functionality seems to beg for a tabbed interface (several options
here: tabs for accounts, or tabs for the different content 'streams').
The current radio groups for account and stream selection feel unelegant
and repetitive.

- The 'show user' page is bizarre, with a single entry+button in the
middle of the page.

- When I added accounts in the preferences dialog, the accounts menu
seemed to lag behind (after adding one account, the menu was empty,
after adding a second account, the first one showed up in the menu)

- The use of the warning icon in the 'direct message to' entry feels
wrong to me. There is nothing wrong (yet), so don't warn me...

- The credits in the about dialog have a newline problem.

- The statusicon has some problems. 'Show menu' and 'Show toolbar'
really have no place in the context menu there. Neither does 'About...'.
And 'New status' and 'New direct message' don't seem to present the main
window. It would be much better to have the menu on left-click instead
of right-click, to go with the general desire to make systray icons
behave 'menu-like'.

As I said on irc, not sure I'm the best person to judge the usefulness
of adding a microblogging client to the default install. I'd personally
be more interested in exploring how to integrate microblogging in the
gnome-shell message bar.

But, compared to gwibber, this seems to be a much better choice for our
livecd. So, a (weak) +1 from me... 


Matthias