[swift-users] Chat themable? Option for people without pictures

[Kevin Smith]

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de> wrote:
> Is it possible to change the view/layout/theme of the groupchat display?

It's not, right now. We've been doing a chunk of work on
screenreader/accessibility support, which includes having an
alternative chat view. But while we anticipate this being available in
3.0, it's mostly designed to be useful for screen readers, and may
well not be sufficiently beautiful for a user to want. Enhancements to
make this view also useful for users who don't like the default
webkit-driven view would be welcome, but we don't currently have them
on the roadmap to do ourselves.

I note that the theme itself is HTML-based, based on Adium's themes.
We chose this one originally largely because very few of the available
themes at the time seemed to be explicitly licensed in a suitable way.
Offering a theme chooser is something I've always thought would be
good, but we haven't found time to do (and the slight changes from the
Adium theme make it slightly inconvenient to just drop in other
themes). This is another of those things that are compatible with our
goals, but we've not got on the immediate roadmap.

> My problem is that most of my communication partners do not have avatars
> configured, so the first column is insentitive to me, because I only have
> birds in there. So I' prefer a more compact chat display that has the
> sender's nickname first.
>
> I like many of Swifts design decisions and its policy to try to be well
> usable, however my usecase is real and Swift so far does not offer a good
> user experience here.

I understand. I think addressing this usecase is consistent with our
goals, but I don't know when/if we'll find time to work on it.

/K