Freerunner Chat Application: Suggestions wanted!

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

David Ford <david at blue-labs.org> writes:
>
> Yogiz wrote:
> > Rewrite Pidgin's UI to be as finger friendly as possible. That's
> > probably all we need. Why reinvent the wheel.
>
> because pidgin takes a lot of ram, is cpu heavy and does a lot of disk
> activity.  that wheel is sort of acceptable on a fat desktop, but not on
> a cellphone :)

I've actually found Pidgin to be perfectly acceptable on my
FreeRunner, both in performance and finger-friendliness (especially
since SHR update the GTK+ theme to use larger, more finger-friendly
widgets). Not that it couldn't be *better* somehow, but...:

The thing that *really* bugs me about using Pidgin for IM over GPRS on
the Freerunner is that the GPRS traffic prevents the FreeRunner from
going to (or staying in) a suspend state--it looks like it wakes up
every time a packet comes in, and the chat protocols are apparently
fairly (pardon the pun) chatty. I've been thinking about how to work
around *that*....

Assuming that it's not just my configuration (which I suppose it could
be--in which case, I'm wasting bandwidth...), my initial idea was that
I could have Pidgin connect to some proxy server out on the Internet,
and have the proxy `compress out' all of the excessive chattiness so
that there aren't any keepalive packets sent to the phone, for
example; or that I could, alternately, have a proxy IM client on a
remote server that sends a specially-formed SMS when there's IM
activity that should actually make the mobile client wake up and
establish a connection/login of its own. Interestingly, by complete
coincidence, I later discovered that this latter `SMS callback' scheme
is ostensibly what the what the `mobile e-mail' applications often
*do* use (my wife told me that she started receiving `weird
text-messages from some 3020 number' after switching to a new phone).

As to whether `write a new GUI for Pidgin' or `write a new GUI app
based on libpurple' is a better route..., is there actually a
difference?

-- 
Don't be afraid to ask (Lf.((Lx.xx) (Lr.f(rr)))).