What my new Chat App Hopefully Looks like (Imagination).

[templest]

Don't think I actually coded something that looks like this ( ..yet). My new chat app is written in C#, and after spending about three hours tweaking out the protocol, I started thinking about what I'm going to make it look like.
This is what I've come up with so far; if you guess what other app I got my inspiration from, you get 2 bits.

PS: We need larger upload quotas.

[Paul]

MSN? Hahahahaha.... *hides*

[templest]

Paul wrote:

MSN? Hahahahaha.... *hides*

Ew.. You deserve minus bits.

[Tony]

wow, how did you had 250% of your upload quota filled? eh... fixed

umm... I personally don't like all that extra blank space under the text. Could get annoying since text will be scrolling so much faster

[Amailer]

thats like AIM on the mac...(a very like like...)

[templest]

tony wrote:

wow, how did you had 250% of your upload quota filled? eh... fixed

tony (Sun Jun 27, 2004 10:00 pm) wrote:

i upped your space from 2 to 5mb cuz you almost filled it up.

if you need more though, just msg - if it's a reasonable request, I'll try to accommodate

EDIT: What I would do is make those big green arrows scroll through individual messages (instead of just lines), and if a message is too big to fit on the screen, you can either make the window larger or a pair of smaller scroll arrows would appear to scroll through the message instead of flipping to another.

[Tony]

I ment the message bubble as it is can hold 4 lines of text, but it is only occupied by 2, one being username anyways.. I see that as a waste of space.

[templest]

Meh, It's not like that's exactly what it would look like. Just some concept designs.

[md]

looks good

[Hikaru79]

Looks *VERY* good from an aesthetic point of view, but I've seen too many cases where an ambitious project dies before it's ever born because it's creator starts thinking about the extras (pretty GUI layouts and text scrolling) before the essential stuff (the communication protocol).

If this takes off though, awesome-ness Release the source so I can compile it on Linux too!

[Mazer]

Psst! He already did the protocol.

[templest]

I have the chat protocol down. But I'm thinking of re-writing a good portion of it. You see, I've been experimenting with P2P file transfer lately, and I want to see if I could apply the same principle to make a decentralized chat protocol. This would obviously help the project grow, because, for one, I wouldn't / couldn't have a server running 24/7 and making anything like Hotline (ie: Private Servers) is bound for destruction. But I could instead have everything managed off a database on my web-server and try to take the load off the server some, since then the only reason a server would be necessary would be to track IPs, connections, and accounts. But not actually manage those connections (ie: the server would not be a relay for all messages / transfers).

As it stands so far, the environment is pretty much the same as the Turing version but written in a better language, with more, er, clean code. This is good for private servers, but like said, this isn't my main goal. Anyways, I'm getting to ahead of myself. First thing's first, decentralize the network. I also want to get good encryption in there, but that's not essential to a project that's barely even started. I'm GPLing it btw.

[Mazer]

Are you already set on the colour scheme? The bubbles seem... interesting, but I don't know if I like the blue/orange. Maybe if they were lighter?

[templest]

I was thinking of rendering in a fcuk load of shades and making a color wheel in a menu somewhere where you could pick your colours.

[Cervantes]

Bah! Colours aren't what matters here. What matters is being able to see a good chunck of the conversation at any time. Having so much space used for colours limits the amount of the conversatoin that you can see.
But if you must have these fancy colours, I'd go with a light blue colour, for both, like compsci.ca.