The ironically non-pedantic kind. The point beyond the internal inter-personal squabbles of this forum is if 5 isn't enough for you, request the features you want through the maemo bugzilla. If you have other suggestions, request them via maemo bugzilla. Only putting them here will result in them being ignored at best; at worst they will turn into flamebait.

Wrong is wrong though.

2/5 = .40 and that times 100 = 40%

It should have been 5/2 * 100 = 250%

Now, with that aside... go RTCOMM over Pidgin... and this comes from a person that came from Pidgin - before that, Miranda IM - and switched to it on my machines. It integrates with the OS better, saves space and works rather well, even with my Gizmo dial-in number set up via IPKall.

I use MirandaIM on my PC, but RTcomm on my Tablet. I don't need anything other than to be able to chat with people, so file transfers, invisible mode, etc, is all superfluous.

The only thing I would like to see is the ability to quickly and easily choose what accounts get signed in. As it is now, I have to go into the Account settings and disable the ones i don't want signed in.

Pidgin, is, well, another app. Using more memory, etc. The Tablets are very capable, but in such a limited environment, specially when I've got internet, MaemoWordpy, and Mirage running sometimes, that extra little bit helps.

Those considering RTCOMM, highly suggest updating to the beta. It's REAL easy to switch in and out of red pill mode, and i"ve done it repeatedly for the various updates without having any issues.

I switched from pidgin to rtcomm because of difficulty finding a chat window in pidgin once it is minimised. You have to click the systray icon, then your whole desktop goes blank, then you have to press the home button to bring up the application list, then pick pidgin, then double-click the user in the buddy list to then bring back the conversation. Crazy stuff.

rtcomm, is good, but has one major bug. If you disable "auto away", then go online, sometimes it appears you are online, when infact you are marked as away. You can find this out by opening a chat window, and you will see next to your icon that you are actually away, even though your presence tray icon says you're online. Sometimes it quickly changes to online when you open the chat window, otherwise you have to select avaliable mode.

One other problem I have with rtcomm is that it does not give you the ability to notify when users come online or go offline. I thought of a solution to this - by running "dbus-monitor" in xterm, I can see that there are dbus messages for contacts changing status. So I could write a python script to check for these, and then display a notification and/or log status changes. Maybe even execute a command for certain special contacts. Pity I don't know python! But there are some nice examples of doing this with pidgin here: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/pidgin-2-0.ars/4

Anyone want to tackle this?

Not that Pidgin is bad or anything, but RTCOMM's integration into the IT is freakin superb.

One thing I'd love to see with RTCOMM is DirectIM support for AIM, for no other reason than it'd be great to be able to take a snapshot with the webcam and then paste it right into a conversation.

Hmmm, that 'away' bug in rtcomm is worse than I thought. It sets you as away even if you are busy using your NIT. Even if you disable auto-away in the presence settings. You only find out when you open a chat window. Anyone else experience this? Where does one log this bug?

I also realised (by looking at the output of dbus-monitor) why opening the contacts list is so slow and uses up 100% cpu. It seems, upon opening, this list queries the online status of every contact in your list against all the im servers. I would've thought that it maintains this list in the background like most im clients. When you have a lot of contacts, this process is slow.

For me, the inability to see who's online without starting another app has made me return to pidgin. I keep one side of my NIT clear for desktop picture reasons so the contacts applet doesn't do it for me. If it had an option for icons only and a way to make them really small, i'd probably use it.

Is it really querying the servers, or just the dbus calls to the telepathy backend?

There is the persistent IM backend ( telepathy ) that does all the protocol stuff and then the front end ( chat_ui, contact list, ... ) can be closed completely and will query for the state information when it is launched from telepathy ( not necessarily the actual IM servers ).

You're probably right. I was thinking of that after I posted. Still, it's a very slow process.

I'll switch to RTCOMM when:

1) it actually makes me invisible when I set my status to invisible - I know that not all chat service let you do that, but RTCOMM should work properly with those ones that do support it.
2) I can tell it to not auto-IDLE nor auto-AWAY me. It should keep the status I told it, no matter how idle I am, no matter if my screen dims, etc.
2a) it'd be nice if RTCOMM had some visibility into, and integration with, the power management stuff. Don't power down if you're signed in. Don't fully shut off the screen if you're not AWAY (partially dim the screen: yes, fully blank the screen: no). Settings/options like that.
3) easy to create custom statii (like pidgin) -- I like to have more status info than just "away". Like "I'm in a meeting", "I'm watching TV", etc.
4) I can have chat logs that automatically get stored on the data device of my choice (removable card, internal card, somewhere under /home/user).

If those are do-able now, then great. Let me know, and I'll switch. But, from what I've heard whenever I've looked into switching, these are ways in which RTCOMM is not yet fully baked.