New features

Before people start wondering why I'm delaying updates to IPMessenger, let me tell you what it takes to add one feature.

The feature in question is the addition of logging. One might want to archive important messages and retrieve them later. In the first glance this seems simple enough. Most of support files like these are stored in the Application Support/IPMessenger directory. All that needs to be done is to create one file per every user to interact with, store every message that pops up with its time stamp.

Now come the problems: How will the archives be retrieved? Will the IPMessenger provide an interface for it (like Adium)? Or just let the users look at the plain text files? If we are to provide an interface, this little feature will require the user-interface design, a good file format for the archived files, a way to delete the archives, export them as text files etc.

All in all, a significant update but which, in my opinion, is not worth the feature. Very few people use the archives (for something like IPMessenger) and that too for a very few things (like if they delete the last message accidentally).

Lets suppose we do not want to take all that trouble and let the users look at the plain text files. This also has the advantage that since the files are text files, spotlight can index them. However one can't expect all the users to know where the application support files are. What if you don't want archives of every conversation? What if you don't want archives at all?

How will the archives be deleted? They just can't keep growing indefinitely. One menu item to remove all archives? What if one specific user's archives are important and the rest are not? Or if only one user's archive has to be deleted? This includes significant number of preferences for something which will be used very rarely (if at all).

My solution so far has been to put just two menu items - last sent message and last received message. If you accidently close the last received message, or you want to send the sent message again (or to someone else), these two actions come in handy. I think this is what most people use.

If you have any suggestions about the archiving, please let me know. I do plan to incorporate the archiving feature if people find it important.