Instant Messaging: Cutting the Bloat

As anyone who uses a laptop as their primary computer knows, eye-candy filled sidebars and text-packed toolbars quickly lead to a cramped and frustrating workspace. After over a year of using a 1280x800 screen exclusively, I've learned to live without the clutter and maintain an attractive and functional system. My recent switch to Vista encouraged a change to a more attractive work area, and my shiny new Dual-Core Acer opened new doors for heavier programs, which resulted in my new desktop.

While I have begun using more resource intensive programs, utilizing minimal ones for everyday use means more RAM and CPU for everything else. This lead me to consider some new options in the IM client area. I've been a user of Astra's Trillian for some time, and have grown accustomed to its interface. Trillian is, unfortunately, heavy on resources and offers very few customization options.

My former desktop (see Streamlining Firefox) contained nothing but the basics, a taskbar and my chat client, if active. When I began using IM more heavily, Trillian was the far and away winner for linking Jabber, MSN, and AIM, because of its easy skinable interface (as seen in the link above). But as I quested for the most minimal and customizable programs, Miranda IM overtook Trillian. Miranda is debatebly the most customizable chat client, outside of personal programs created by advanced coders. Even more attractively, Miranda has a minuscule footprint, as I use it now it eats up a tiny 10mb of RAM, and CPU usage never spikes higher than 2-3% while typing. Customizing Miranda takes a good bit of patience, as could be expected of a program with so many options and possible configurations. Miranda accepts various plugins that alter its interface, functionality, and look. The specifics of my client setup are long and complicated, but the end result is rewarding.

Yes, any and all elements of my contact list except for the names and statuses of my contacts are totally absent, and there is no background to speak of. Double clicking a contact name opens the chat window, which is also devoid of any buttons or toolbars.

Such an empty interface is uncommon to most users, but I quickly learned to adapt to it out of necessity. An evaluation of my most commonly used programs quickly revealed how little I use certain visual elements, or how easily a space-hogging component can be replaced or removed altogether. Take, for example, an unfortunate Trillian user who has elected to use the default/tabbed (bloated) interface.

This user's setup demonstrates several distinct examples of window elements that waste space.

A. The Tab Bar
Tabbed interfaces have recently revolutionized web browsing, to the point that any browser that does not make use of one seems unacceptably inefficient. Considering that Internet Explorer, the most widely used browser in the world, introduced tabs as late as Version 7 (2006), it seems remarkable that the tabbed interface could become so essential so quickly. Yes, more advanced browsers like Firefox supported tabs a full four years before IE7 (Mozilla Phoenix 1.2 Lucia, Oct. 12, 2002), but Microsoft's implementation of the tab speaks volumes; a company that actively avoids changes in UI had to support tabs or risk losing an even greater amount of market share to open-souce, community based browsers like Opera and Firefox, who are notoriously faster in heeding the requests of their users. These browsers were the first to recognize the advantage of tabs because they are consistently updated by hundreds of thousands of developers, who use their own creation daily. Thusly, a feature that provides a massive efficiency boost is always adopted with speed. Tabbed UIs are an extreme example; it seems absurd to leave browser windows ungrouped and separated, each an individual entry in the Windows Taskbar. For the laptop user, individual windows crowd an already sure to be crowded screen.

So extending tabbed interfaces to IM applications is a natural expansion of an improvement in user interface that affects any program that may have multiple windows, which brings us to Trillian's tab bar. Trillian uses a "container" system that must be accessed from a complicated and frustrating right-click system. Right-clicking on the titlebar of the message window displays to the user a stifling list of Trillian's options and actions; hidden within this array is the container system. Containers are merely windows in which tabs are stored; they can be created, closed, and altered in an impressive number of ways. Unfortunately, adding message windows to containers requires navigating the right click interface mentioned previously. A keyboard shortcut or drag-and-drop system, popularized by Apple, would be far more intuitive.

The user in this case has made use of the container system with his single window. Upon seeing the presence of his tab bar (Fig. A), my first reaction is, "What is that doing there?" There is but one window in this container, so there are no other windows to switch between, rendering the tab bar useless. Miranda's massive amount of options include a "Hide tab bar if there is only one tab" checkbox, solving the problem permanently. If your default preference in Trillian includes an automatic container for newly opened message windows, as it should if you use commonly chat with more than one person, your window will look as the user above's does. Detaching the window requires active intervention in the form of clicking the tiny "eject" button in window's tab or navigating the aforementioned right-click dialogue. In this situation, Trillian fails where Miranda excels; Miranda's small option saves the user many wasted clicks and wasted desktop real estate. For the laptop user, both of these are especially valuable; trackpads are often annoying and difficult to use.

B. The Menu Toolbar
Nearly all applications use some form of menu toolbar, even the minimal Mac OS X utilizes a dedicated bar for all programs. I find it wasteful when a few options (File, Edit, View, etc.) are shown, and hundreds of empty pixels fill the remainder of the toolbar, as seen above. This area is where Firefox really shines: not only can items and toolbars be added alongside the Menu toolbar in Firefox, saving valuable space (see Streamlining Firefox again), but the entire toolbar can be condensed into a single four character entry tited "Menu" with the invaluable add-on TinyMenu.

Contrary to Firefox, where essential items are listed in the menu toolbar, there are very few "essential" items in an IM client. Selecting the menu entries in Trillain, the user is presented with only useless and redundant items that are already present in other areas of the client. "File", for instance, gives actions like "View Activity History", an action accessible from several other areas of the client. "Edit" is totally useless, it features common copy/paste actions and the absurd "Insert URL". Similar tools reside in the other drop downs, begging the question of why Astra is including so many features that I would only ever use if my keyboard suddenly disappeared. For the laptop user, the inclusion of something as elementary as "Paste" is especially frustrating because he relies on the keyboard so much more often. Even the computer novice using an actual mouse should be ashamed not to know the most widely used shortcuts, like Ctrl+V. Additionally, the "Actions" drop-down can be accessed in its entirety by right-clicking on a contact's name in the contact list, rendering it completely redundant and unneeded.

Miranda's developers seem to have recognized how useless such a toolbar is, as there is no similar toolbar in the message window of the client.

C. The Toolbar
Luckily for Trillian's laptop crowd, the massive icons pictured above can be made smaller with a simple right-click. Still, this toolbar is a massive space waster. Every icon-represented "tool" is this toolbar is as redundant as the items in the menu toolbar. In fact, every single item is actually an entry in the menu toolbar. So not only is the menu bar redundant, but there is an entire icon filled toolbar that duplicates the entries in it! Mac OS X's developers went out of their way to make sure that there are three different ways to preform any action in the OS, but they have nothing on Astra. They've actually provided 2-3 different graphical ways to preform any action. Such wasteful design has no place in any IM client I use, so during my days with Trillian, I used the "Minimal" interface, which does not display a graphical toolbar but leaves the Menu toolbar intact. Trillian provides three different interfaces: default, tabbed, and minimal. That is basically the extent of user customization over the message window, apart from some minor changes like font and text color.

This is yet another area of the many where Miranda blows Trillian out of the water. Of course, the option to show/hide the toolbar (called the "tool bar," and satisfyingly small) is generously provided, but Miranda's developers have purposely made it unnecessary. Miranda displays any options not available by shortcut, like viewing a user's AIM profile, by right-clicking on the user's name in the contact list. As a result, a toolbar free Miranda is no less feature filled than Trillian, and saves all the space those useless bars occupied.

D. Avatars
I used to be a fan of using avatars; I made sure I had an attractive one, and readily displayed those of my friends. I quickly realized, however, their uselessness. They provide no functional advantage; the name of whoever I am chatting with is displayed in the windows tab or titlebar, so avatars do not help me there, the only area in which they are of any use. They also take up more of that valuable screen space. I couldn't justify devoting such a large part of my message window to something that has no practical use.

Both Miranda and Trillian provide the option to display avatars in the contact list. This is another area where they are useless, because I'd rather select the name of my contact then try to remember whatever (usually irrelevant) image they have chosen to represent them. I've also found that avatars often clash with the theme of my client or OS.

F. The Chat Dialogue
Trillian handles the chat area somewhat well: it allows the user to adjust font and color, as well as timestamp display, but that is where customization ends. MIranda, however, offers unlimited customization options for the chat area. Several different plugins are available to completely alter the default display if you find it lacking, as I did (although it is still far superior to Trillian). These plugins themselves are skinable and customizable, to the extent that their are databases with thousands of skins for each one. I settled on one that separates the dialogue by user but groups the messages of each user together if uninterrupted. There are many Trillian skins that preform the same action, but keep in mind that there is no way to customize them unless you are willing to learn complicated code.

G. The Formatting Toolbar
This is yet another redundant toolbar, all its wares are available elsewhere except for the emoticon (smiley) inserter. I have no use for graphical emoticons or emoticons in general; they are annoying, unprofessional, and waste more space, bandwidth, and resources. Trillian users who cannot live without them are forced to display this toolbar.

H. The Send Button
Clicking this button sends the current message. I firmly refuse to believe that navigating the mouse to this button and clicking it, after typing on the keyboard, could possibly be any faster than a quick tap of the enter key. This is a useless space-waster.

J. The Status Bar
Most programs use a status bar to display excess information that cannot be shown elsewhere. I don't need to know when I last received a message. The icon that displays if your chat buddy is typing is displayed appropriately in the titlebar of the Miranda window, outfoxing Trillian's icon, which is located on the status bar. I have the option to display this bar in Miranda unchecked, because it is just as useless there.

This user's chat window is so bloated that the majority of the screen space is devoted to completely useless features. He can't help all of it, though, because Trillian forces some things to be displayed. Miranda, on the other hand, can display as little or as much information as you'd like, it is the customizer's dream. If I had different options enabled, my contact list, instead of only displaying the names and statuses of my contacts, could be filled with more bloat than the default Trillian interface. Instead, it occupies an incredibly small amount of space on my screen. Only online contacts are displayed, as showing offline ones wastes space and adds nothing functionally. Miranda's message window shows only the essentials, and can be shrunk to fit in the slim area between my web browser and the right side of my screen. It leaves a nearly nonexistent memory and CPU footprint as well. Before making the switch to Miranda, I was forced to minimize my contact list to save space. No more; I can proudly display my contact list because it is tiny and fits perfectly with the rest of my desktop.