So, I liked jablet's jabber server just fine ... but I don't know how much I'm going to use it.

What I was hoping for was a persistent point of presence. Like, I could run jabber on my tablet (for 2 different personalities) and leave it running when I get to my desktop ... which runs adium. It would have all of my chat accounts (2 AIM, 2 Yahoo, 2 MSN, 2 Google Talk), and if I was logged in to Adium it would be the preferred point for conversations, but if I wasn't, then it would just go to my tablet.

That all in fact works. What doesn't work is that some of the finer details bug me:

1) when talking to someone who is on a cell phone IM client instead of a regular one, Adium without jabber shows them as "on via a wireless client". Adium with jabber just shows them as "on". I don't like losing that bit of information.

2) when sending them IM's from Adium, via jabber, my messages come from "johnkzin@aim.jablet.org" instead of just "johnkzin". I would prefer this to be transparent to my correspondents. They shouldn't know if I'm directly using AIM, or using AIM via a jabber gateway.

3) the icons on the tablet, for presence, kind of annoy me. "Red" means to me "online, but away", not "offline". Instead, "offline but away" is shown as yellow. If it were up to me, the "offline" icon would be dark grey (showing your own status as invisible would be light grey). The "away" icon would be a red dot. Yellow would be idle. Green would be not-idle (as it is now).

These aren't jablet's fault, of course. #1 and #2 are either Adium's fault, or the fault of jabber gateways in general. #3 is a Maemo issue. But, it causes the experience to not quite sit well with me. Not sure how I'll proceed with this for now.

Though, I do appreciate all of the work that went into this.

The problem with this is that there is no coresponding Jabber status for "mobile". There's no real way for the clients to realize that person is mobile. Some attempt to cheat and change the name of the person to add (mobile) after, but that's not really a clean solution.

I personally don't care if they're mobile or not.

That should not happen because it *IS* transparent. It's quite possible that it still shows up as @aim.jablet.org on YOUR end (which is what it should be doing) but there's no way it should show up like that to your contacts. In my ten years of using Jabber, I've never even once seen this happen, so I'm going to guess it's either a) Adium screwing something up majorly or b) you're mistaking seeing it with @aim.jablet.org as meaning that your contact sees it too.

I've never once seen a client that uses red for away instead of disconnected. Pretty much everything I've seen shows red as being disconnected and it's also more or less the standard everywhere.

Only option I can give you there is to hack the icons (which is entirely possible) to show you the colors you'd like.

Thanks, I appreciate that. You've given me a newfound disrespect for Adium though.

Adium, Fire, iChat, and I think AIM for Mac all use red for away. Not sure about Yahoo for Mac.

Adium, Fire, and iChat also used a dull grey (both the status icon, and the contact name) for disconnected. (and, again, I'm pretty sure that's what Yahoo uses; AIM does something kind of different)

That's pretty much the model I'm used to.

As for mobile: I agree that I wouldn't want it to show up in their name, but I do like to know when they're mobile or not. It changes bits of the conversation usually (how frequently I expect their replies, how verbose I expect their replies to be, and how verbose I try to be with my messages to them). It can spell the difference between "They're on the road and can't be wordy" and "you seem upset because you're being really 'short' with me". If I have the information available to me, I don't have to guess.

As for @aim.jablet.org: It could be Adium. I basically was talking to myself in Adium, from one window to another. Usually Adium is rather good about having this represented accurately. I suppose I could use Adium for one side of the conv, and pick something else to host the other side of the conversation, and see how that comes through.

I just tested it with multiple clients and accounts on different computers. It hasn't yet shown anything but the AIM name. I think it's because you're just trying to be too clever with Adium.

Mine is like that too.

In which respect?

It shows the whole <name>@aim.jablet.org

It shows you that locally, which is normal, but when it's sent out to other users, they don't see @aim.jablet.org. In fact, I'm pretty sure AIM doesn't even support the @ symbol in their screen names.

If you want, send me a message and we'll see how it comes up.

Yeah, it only says the locally. It doesn't say that when I'm sending messages.