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 Originally Posted by machx
Here is my letter to them. I feel as though I should share this with the community before anyone else makes a purchase believing their "always online" claim. I do not intend this to be slanderous, I actually wrote it with the intention of helping them since theres great potential for the app. With A LOT of work to get it out of the abysmally beta stage it is in.....
I do appreciate that this is a step or two up from the standard AIM client, however there are major flaws that bother me VERY much. I REALLY wish they were fixed because then you would have a nice messaging program right here.
Thank you sir.
I will start with what happened this past night. I left it on over night with no away message. You advertise Verichat as being "Always online" Well I went on my computer with a different name and my name was on, but I tried sending myself a message. Not only was an away message up (incorrectly so because I never put one up nor do I have an autoresponse) but I NEVER RECEIVED THE MESSAGE. This is NOT "always online" as your website advertises. When I sign off, my away message goes up. I CANNOT GET MY NAME TO SIGN OFF, despite reset after reset and logging in and out of the application, even taking the battery out. So I'm going to miss a lot of messages here. I really do not appreciate this at all, your 25 dollar program is not working as advertised. PERIOD.
Based on your description, you had probably signed in to AIM from elswhere; another PC, or AIM Mobile. As you probably know, you can signin to AIM from multiple locations simultaneously. However, if you signin then from VeriChat and try to signout, only your Verichat session will be logged off, which is what you kept seeing.
I will put this down as "pilot error".
A simple way to signoff from all locations in AIM is to send a "1" in response to the special message that comes in from "AOL System Message" when you signon from a PC. If you had done that, you would perhaps have not been so frustrated.
No offense to the developers of this application, but it largely looks and feels like a BETA application, not something one would pay 25 dollars for. There should be a way to easily switch with two keystrokes between chats. Menu +1 should go to one chat, Menu + 2 to another chat, etc. This is how a standard mobile aim client works.
The lack of a single feature that you like and which is not present in a application does not necessarily make it "beta" grade. In response to your last post, we asked you to write to us and promised to listen to you, and we mean it. We will fix this issue of being able to use a couple of keystrokes to switch between chat sessions shortly, although probably a little bit differently from what you suggest, and more along the lines of what we do in our Blackberry product.
There are, even today, multiple ways to quickly switch between sessions, as has been noted by several users. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to incorporate user suggestions in real-time during a long holiday weekend, even for us.
Away messages are horribly ugly. When checking other people's away messages, there should be a much larger box than two lines, you have a large amount of screen unused here. Also, More than 5 away messages should be allowed. There should be an easy way to enter a new message rather than having to create a completely new one and save it when often times people use an away message just for a night.
An easy way to edit an existing away message is to simply tap (or rocker-center) with a "Away message" selected. This will open up a Away message editor. We will increase the number of away messages you can define easily, but based on what you said, you probably do not necessarily want to clutter yourself up with 10s or 100s of use-only 1 time "away messages".
Already VeriChat tries to show as much of the away message that it can next to the screen name itself, and you can read more using the Contact Properties popup. We are working on another mechanism to show long away messages for the next version of VeriChat.
In general, throughout the whole application there should be no empty space with a few small exceptions. This is a mobile app so you dont really have room to leave space open and put scroll box, this is annoying as well.
As we have said earlier, good mobile UI is about delicate balance between cramming a lot of things up into a small page, and at the same time presenting a uncluttered look with easy to use visual spacing. This is not easy. That said, we continously look for ways to improve VeriChat in this respect. One thing that you could try, if you have good eyes and wish to cram a lot of stuff into a single page, is to use Gills Sans MT with size 6 in VeriChat.
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