Next Saturday will be a once-in-a-lifetime milestone for me. I’ll travel by air, for the first time. Twice, in less than 48 hours.
I’ll beam myself to Athens for a concert by my favourite band, Archive. It’s something I really wanted to attend for very long, that concert. And also trying those big metallic birds that are supposed to transfer people overseas (yeah, right).
The man of my life™ knew best: he decided that we should travel by air and booked the tickets almost without asking me, because he knew that I would try my best to talk my way out of airplanes and into ships.
The trip will be pretty much short (about 30-40 minutes from Heraklion to Athens) but I’m sure it will be eventful. Because I’ll be screaming in despair when the aeroplane starts gathering speed to take off, thinking of Lost first episodes and other colourful imagery.
Adium, for those who don’t recognize the name, is an amazing OSX application that acts as a multiple IM client for MSN, Yahoo!, Gtalk, AIM, Jabber and more (Windows users, think Trillian or Gaim). It has a variety of good features, plus its best one: it’s free.
I use it almost every day on my Macbook to talk with friends and colleagues. It’s a great little app. But it has a quirk that I’ll never manage to come to good terms with.
Adium supports tabbed conversation, which is pretty convenient indeed. The problem arises when the user want to close a tab.
There is no visible icon with an X on it, even on hover tab. The possible next step is to right click and see if there is a relevant option. Alas, there’s not.
I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been fooling around the Adium chat interface for too long till I discovered (accidentally) how to close a tab.
You have to hover the teeny tiny icon that precedes user’s name, which then gracefully becomes an X icon, which you can click to close the tab.
Excuse me, my developer friends, but this is downright ridiculous. Why am I supposed to know that? Why not add the “Close tab” option to the right click menu? Why can’t I close a tab without activating it first? (say, when you dont want the lurker that stands above your shoulder to see what you’ve been up to)
I don’t really know if this is documented (I guess it is), but frankly, I don’t care. I shouldn’t have to search though the help system to just close a conversation tab!
EDIT: link
adium, macosx, usability
