A long time ago I wrote a simple plugin for the gaim instant messenger client, which would rework the GUI to my liking.

Rather than displaying contacts in a group of trees it would display them in a list control, with user editable fields.

I used to set mine to have three columns:

| Login  | Name | Location | Notes |

This made it much simpler to keep track of lots of people in different places.

Today whilst clearing up my home area I found the code, which was for gaim .7, and tried to build it against gaim 1.1. No joy.

Sadly most of the things that I learnt about gaim and gtk are both long since forgotten.

Still it was a fun discovery - just one of the things you stumble across when cleaning out ~/Programs I guess!

I still don't understand why so many IM clients group contacts in tree structures - to me it seems much more logical to have fields in a list control. I guess I"m alone.

Update - found the mention in my old diary. Code dates from September 2003.