Guifications

About

Guifications is a Pidgin plugin that displays "toaster" popups in a user-defined corner of the screen, similar to features that have been added to the official MSN Messenger (now called Windows Live Messenger), Yahoo! Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger clients. It's highly configurable, easy to use, and has theme support. It really is the end-all, be-all toaster pop-up plugin for Pidgin!

Version 2.0 was a complete rewrite from the 1.x tree and added many new features like themes and monitor placement. It is currently in maintenance mode as we develop its successor, Guifications 3.

Screenshots

Screenshots are located here.

Themes

Themes are the only thing still located on SourceForge. They are in this tracker.

Here is the Theme Howto for those interested in developing themes.

FAQ

Why are so many feature requests closed as "wontfix"?

We are not interested in adding new features to Guifications 2.x currently. Instead, our development efforts are focused on the Purple Plugin Pack and Guifications 3. We are, however, attempting to fix those bugs which we are able to track down and fix. Anyone who wishes to submit a patch to implement a feature may do so; we will review patches and are likely to accept them if they are well-written and won't cause an excessive maintenance burden.

Why don't email notifications work?

This is a bit of a trick question. Technically they do work, just not how everyone expects. Currently, if Pidgin is informed that you have precisely one new email for a given account, then Guifications will display a notification. However, if Pidgin is informed that you have more than one new email for a given account, Guifications doesn't do anything.

We do consider this to be a bug (see #328). It may, however, be quite some time until we release a version in which this is fixed.

What happened to the Appearance page?

The appearance page was removed in favor of its successor feature, themes.

What are themes?

Themes define how notifications appear. After a few feature requests for them and seeing a few screenshots of notifications with backgrounds and the Appearance page settings for those notifications, Gary decided to actually implement them. They're designed to be distributable.

Why can I load multiple themes at once?

Gary likes variety, so he designed themes with variety in mind. The idea is that themes can handle as many or as few notifications as the author wishes. When an event occurs, Guifications chooses a theme from the list of loaded themes supporting that notification type and displays the notification using that theme. You can also right-click on a buddy or group and set a Guifications Theme for the buddy or group.

Where did <insert pref name here> go?

Eventually every application or plugin will end up with what we call "preference bloat," where too many options exist. Generally some preferences will get removed and the behavior will match sensible default values of those preferences. These changes will be logged in the ChangeLog.

How do I change the font?

Edit your theme or create a new one.

How do I install a theme?

There are two ways:

• From the Pidgin buddy list window, go to the Tools menu and select Plugins. Find and select Guifications in the list, then click "Configure Plugin." Go to the Themes tab. Drag and drop a theme that is in a .tar.gz format archive onto the list of themes.
• Unpack the theme from its archive and place the resulting theme directory in .purple/guifications/themes. The location of .purple will, of course, depend on your environment.

How can I change the default colors with a gtkrc?

See the example .gtkrc-2.0. To use it, edit ~/.gtkrc-2.0 on Linux and UNIX or %APPDATA%\.gtkrc-2.0 on Windows, put what you want from the example in that file, save it, and restart Pidgin.

Why isn't CVS/SVN/MTN supported?

See the wiki page on the subject.

Why does Guifications disappear on WinPidgin upgrades?

This is a problem with the Pidgin installer. When you upgrade Pidgin with the installer, it removes the old installation, including everything in the Pidgin directory. This means that you will need to reinstall Guifications. You should be installing all themes to your user account's .purple/guifications/themes directory (generally %APPDATA%\.purple\guifications\themes, where %APPDATA% is an environment variable which automatically expands as appropriate on all modern Windows versions when used in Explorer's address bar or the Run box's entry area), so that they will not get removed during an upgrade.

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Ticket System

Open Guifications Bugs

#164

Guifications 'Freezes'

#328

Gmail notification doesn't show up

#394

Attempting to duplicate an Image item causes Pidgin to unexpectedly quit on Windows XP

#453

"Name Spoken" - event not triggering

#467

Notification takes over corner upon resuming from screensaver

#493

multiple popups if contact is in buddy list multiple times

Open Guifications Feature Requests

#96

Test Button

#400

Allow drag-n-drop of .zip files to install themes, in addition to .tar.gz files

#404

Allow theme selection for saved channels

#502

Splitting long text into few lines and changing guification size according to the text size

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Pages linking to Guifications:

• WikiStart

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Last Modified on Thu Jul 10 09:53:36 2008 by jbailey (6 weeks ago)