Title: Better chat log viewer Student: Adam Fowler Abstract: I propose that I can improve the current log viewer.

Here is a link to the current look of the log: ​http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/7SCDXyMBhLnCqm7BHVs3dg?feat=directlink

Here is a link to how I think it should look: ​http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/aEXSVhhgOKhJCv9vIglh-w?feat=directlink

• I want to improve the UI for the log viewer, remove redundancy of some aspects, and streamline features into a more easily understandable method. Also, I think there should be a "sort by" feature for the searching of the log.

• Difficult parts of this project will be finding the grouping by person. I feel this may require some linkage on the users part, as not everyone has similar contact informations. Such as: "'markdoliner' on AIM and 'mark.doliner@…' on XMPP".

In short, at the end of the summer, pidgin's log viewer WILL be more user friendly, and generally a bit better organized. It may also have a sorting feature.

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May, Tuesday 25, 2010 : Setup monotone and installed devel version of Pidgin.

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May, Monday 31, 2010 : I read "The C Programming Language", it was a speed run though (one night) so I'll no doubt have to go back and re-read a few things, but it's getting me through learning GTK+ 2.0. I'm going to spend the rest of the day learning GTK.

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June, Wednesday 9, 2010 : Not a lot of coding going on. I'm spending most of my time reading the previous code, and trying to understand each line of it. I attempted at just coding and brute forcing my methods through the previous functions, and ended up failing. I've decided to implement a method called "pidgin_log_show_global()" along side the previous method "pidgin_log_show()". My function should handle a lot of casting to better work with the major part of the logging engine. Regardless of the amount of molding the data into what certain functions need it to be, there will be a required amount of modification to old functions. I suspect there will be many 'skipping' of data-specific functions. I suspect that once I am able to tally all the contacts into a list, I should be able to move quickly. I feel this true as many of the utilities of the log viewer are based on "contact name | raw logs | formated logs" and adding all the contacts, and clicking on a user's name would require the _SAME_ calls as if a user had gone through the "view log process" via Buddy List.

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June, Thursday 17, 2010 : I'm still reading through the code, I'm grasping most of it, there are still a few things that baffle me.

CONTACT INFO
Name: Adam Fowler
IRC: irc.freenode.net
IRC Handle: Adola
Email: xadolax@gmail.com