Anyone who follows gaim development is almost certainly never going to find this. But anyone who has found this, likely knows how much time I spend thinking about gaim. Currently we are in a huge quandary over where to draw the line between being reasonably featureful and offering users choices, and keeping the user interface simple enough for the "average" user to comprehend. "Edging Toward the Ninety/Ten" adds to this debate, being waged in one for or another across the open source world. It does however make some mistakes: it assumes that every user wants the same 10% of options and features. If that were the case, you wouldn't see migration costs moving from MacOS®; to Windows®; or vice versa. One would be easier to use, and there would be a one way learning curve. Really, good UI means "doing what people expect," and then realizing that people expect different things depending on their background. Options should be just barely available enough to compensate for different backgrounds, or else you get the kind of UI that causes Joel On Software to become very popular writing about software development.
