Get tired of scrolling through all that information? Me too. And apparently a bunch of other people--I've seen a number of complaints from people involved with several Linux distributions indicating that our about box has way too much information. Well, this morning, I set out to remedy that.
Remember that insanely long list of current and retired translators? Well, when we release Pidgin 2.7.0, it will no longer be in the About box. To excise this information from the About box, I created a new entry on the Help menu called "Translator Information" that pops up a new dialog similar to the About box. This new dialog lists all current and retired translators.
Once the translators were gone from the About box, the next largest chunk of text was the "Debugging Information" section all the way at the bottom. Considering how frequently we ask users to look at this information, it is nowhere near visible enough sitting at the bottom of the About box's scrollable area. This, too, became its own window, accessible at "Build Information" on the Help menu. (As an interesting side note, this is insanely long in code, too. In fact, it's more lines of code than the printed list of translators takes up in the new translator info dialog!)
Even losing all that text from the dialog wasn't good enough for me. Next I axed the list of developers, crazy patch writers, and retired developers and crazy patch writers. Now these lists are available by clicking "Developer Information" on the Help menu. Since I'd just added three items to the Help menu, it was time to toss a couple menu separators in there so that things look more organized and cleaner. Hey, our Help menu is kinda respectable now!
Now I looked at the about box again. It still felt too verbose to me. Granted, a lot of that information is important, but I started thinking about better ways to say the same things. For a great example, let's look at the first two blobs of text you see after the version info:
Pidgin is a graphical modular messaging client based on libpurple which is capable of connecting to AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, XMPP, ICQ, IRC, SILC, SIP/SIMPLE, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Sametime, Bonjour, Zephyr, MySpaceIM, Gadu-Gadu, and QQ all at once. It is written using GTK+.
You may modify and redistribute the program under the terms of the GPL (version 2 or later). A copy of the GPL is contained in the 'COPYING' file distributed with Pidgin. Pidgin is copyrighted by its contributors. See the 'COPYRIGHT' file for the complete list of contributors. We provide no warranty for this program.
All this information is hugely important. But it's too long. So I tried a surgical strike on the words. It took a few more tries than I care to admit, but I found that I liked this text better:
Obviously I took away some information, namely which IM services Pidgin can connect to. I'm not convinced that needs to be in the about box, considering the exact same text that is in Pidgin 2.6.2's About box is on Pidgin's website. So I carefully dissected the text and came up with a shorter text that gets all the important information across while cutting information most users aren't going to care about reading. I even managed to squeeze in that Pidgin is written in C, which was previously missing (it's a ridiculously frequently asked question).
Pidgin is a messaging client based on libpurple which is capable of connecting to multiple messaging services at once. Pidgin is written in C using GTK+. Pidgin is released, and may be modified and redistributed, under the terms of the GPL version 2 (or later). A copy of the GPL is distributed with Pidgin. Pidgin is copyrighted by its contributors, a list of whom is also distributed with Pidgin. There is no warranty for Pidgin.
Now I had something better. But I could still improve it. We had oversized text pointing to pidgin.im, the FAQ, the IRC channel, and our XMPP conference. I added a new, bold heading, "Helpful Resources," and added those items as indented, normal-sized text items under the heading. This was getting better. Now, one final improvement. We point out that help from other Pidgin users is available by emailing support@pidgin.im. I changed the heading a little so that it reads a bit better. I also changed "3rd party" to "third-party," which is the more correct form.
Something still seemed wrong about the About box, though. I experimented with the size, making it default to 450x450 pixels like the new dialogs I added. This seemed to help a lot. I'd like to make it a touch larger still, but I'm afraid that making it any larger will make it a tight fit on netbook screens. We're already getting complaints that some of our windows don't fit on these smaller screens, so I'm not exactly eager to cause more complaints.
At any rate, for me, the About box's text fits in just under two full "pages" of the scrollable area--that is, the last line of the scrollable area when scrolled all the way to the top is the first line when scrolled all the way to the bottom. There are some other minor tweaks I'm going to look at making that may make the area scroll even less.
In the end, my boredom caused me to take a look at something people have been complaining about for ages. Overall, I think what I've done is a good thing, but we won't really know for sure until we release Pidgin 2.7.0 (don't ask when--we have no idea yet!) and people see the new dialogs. I hope everyone likes what I did!
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