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Goodness Gracious
Authored by: readparse on Jul 09, '02 09:11:58PM

Wow, I really had high hopes for this. I absolutely LOVE Fire, and figured I would like this one just as much or more. Here's a pointer for those who would write an IM client: <b>It's instant messaging!</b> It's not an IDE, or an office productivity suite, or even a web browser. Please don't make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Having said that, let's get specific. Yes, I agree with many other posters that the interface is extremely confusing and it's hard to even get a single account set up.

When I connected to AOL (at least I think I was connected, because I got booted off AOL on my other machine because of it), it didn't download my "mobile users" list, or whatever that list of "buddies" that AOL remembers for you.

Here's the absolute worst part. Having installed Proteus, connect to AOL. Now go to another machine. Connect to AOL. Hilarity ensues, as your new AOL connection kicks your Proteus connection (as it should), and Proteus AUTOMATICALLY reconnects, even though you could be on the other side of the world by now as far as it knows, which results in getting kicked off your new connection at the non-Proteus machine (or non-Proteus client, as the case may be). When you MANUALLY (as it should be) tell your non-Proteus client to reconnect to AOL, Proteus will once again get kicked off, and the cycle continues.

One could argue that there is a preference somewhere in the VAST preference field of this monster application that turns that off, at which point I would retort that an IM client should NEVER behave this way, even if you get drunk one night and tell it to. In cases where only one sign-on is permitted, the LAST sign-on should always win... always.

This is as far as I got. The interface sure is pretty, I'll give it that. I might launch it again when I have absolutely nothing to do, to see if there's any chance that I was wrong about what I reported. In the meantime, I have always loved Fire, and I'm in the dark when it comes to the crashing that others are reporting.

Cheers,
john



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