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Screen Real Estate

The thing that bugs me about most of the Jabber clients out there, is that they are just so BIG.  And often most of the space they take up on my desktop is wasted.  People spend hundreds of dollars buying larger monitors, and video cards that can make the most of them, so the last thing they want is you taking up room that is not supplying them with useful information.

Many of the clients I have seen look similar to email clients, but there is a big difference between how these two applications are used.  Usually when people check email, they open their email client, read and reply to messages, and then close the client again.  Even if the email client is open in the background, normally there will be an alert such as a system-tray icon and a system sound to indicate that new mail has arrived, so the user can switch to the email client read the new message.

By contrast, instant messaging applications are designed to always be running in the background.  It is normal for a user to be working, or surfing the web while carrying out a Jabber conversation.  Because instant messaging relies on presence information, there is a requirement for the users list of contacts to be visible while he or she is working with another application.

Having a list of online and offline contacts is going to take up some screen space, no matter how it is implemented, but there are some ways we can minimise the impact on the user of always having a window open.  This will be covered in more detail in the contacts list section.

Memory & CPU

Although it is not of primary concern as RAM gets cheaper each month, it is worth considering that unlike many programs, a Jabber client is going to stay resident in your users RAM whenever he or she is online, so an attempt should be made to keep memory and CPU resources as low as possible.  This may mean carefully considering what language you choose to develop in, as many have large runtime libraries that must be loaded.  ICQ shows up as using almost 18MB on my system, which is very large for a chat program.  To a lesser extent you should also think about resources such as hard disk space, and how much time the client adds to the users startup sequence if it is set to autostart.