#FF00AA

I don’t know what I was doing, using Trillian for all this time. At what time did Miranda become so good? Last time I tried it, it didn’t do much, hardly worked at all, was useless, and I went back to Trillian. But now I felt like testing new experiences, I reinstalled it, and I can’t believe my eyes.

It has everything I need in an IM client: tons of configuration options, much less bugs and design flaws than Trillian, and a great plug-in architecture that allows it to do much more than IM. ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, YouNameIt networks, but also RSS aggregator, weather report, clock sync, Post-It system and everything else a little contact list window can display. Seems like Miranda isn’t skinnable anymore, but it’s actually an advantage for me, since it means it automatically integrates with my Windowblinds skinned desktop. And there’s the little bonus, that’s so amazing I can’t understand how people lived without it: everytime you open a chat window, the last ten lines are loaded from the history (ten, or more, or less, it’s configurable like the rest) and displayed in the window, so you know where you were in the conversation. Magical, yet so simple and obvious.

I’ve just got a problem. More precisely, two bugs. First, I don’t know how they coded the way chat window flash when you get a message, but it doesn’t work well with Windowblinds. Yes, that’s a detail. Much more annoying (although I managed to live with it, obviously, since I’m still using Miranda, but I still hope it’ll be fixed real soon), ICQ’s invisible mode doesn’t work. Seems that half the people who have me in their contact list see me as online. And the other half sees me offline, like they should. Go figure. I’m too lazy to try deactivating every plug-in to see if any is responsible, but I don’t see how one of them could cause that. So let’s say I’ll get used to being seen online. I’m sure I can.

And… that’s all. No other flaw. Just that one big bug, that’ll necessarily be fixed, but that’s all: unlike Trillian, I don’t spend my time cursing the programmers’ stupid design. Must be a sign that this program is made for geeks. Yeah, with a plug-in system that leads it to triple its volume once you’ve installed everything interesting, it definitely is made for geeks. But you’re blog readers, aren’t you? So just go and download it, you’ll see.