Chat Client Bounties (in Contests)

Hey

There have been a few posts in regards to feature requests for the new version of the chat client, so I'm going to offer some bounties for modifications to the client (to replace the single 50/50 split offer I made in NS's post).

1) Unix-shell style history (up and down arrow) of chat _and_ pm input (keep them separate ;-)

2) A colour selection dialogue. Write some code that brings up a dialogue where the user can select the various colours used in the display (base_text, my_test, base_emote, my_emote etc). You could probably use the font dialogue module as a foundation, and modify it.

3) An iterative font change. At the moment, the code only changes the font of _future_ text to be submitted. Write some code to update the font of all previous text without munging the colours. This should include updating the colours if/when they change according to 2, but if not, that's ok.

4) A tabbed main-chat widget, and a command "/new" that creates a new empty tab in which a user could /join another channel of their choice. Perhaps each "tab" should have an entirely different instance of the state variables, so that /spam could be off in one tab, while on in another; not critical, but would be a nice feature (although one that would necessitate a large overhaul of the code, I imagine).

5) Fix the autoscroll, so that it works perfectly every time (ie - not always autoscrolling; there are times (eg when reading previous text) that we don't want it to autoscroll, and others when we do.

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Bounty Amounts:

The amounts are not equal, because I consider some of them to be much harder than others. The colour selection dialogue, for example, is quite easy, hence the small reward. If multiple people complete the same task, only the first fully featured one will win the bounty (and by first, I mean: first to respond to this thread with notice of completion, with a breakdown of what features you have added and (briefly) how).

1) 100k
2) 50k
3) 150k
4) 150k
5) 50k

Well, that's it, I hope that this contest interests some people. I will certainly credit you in the code when I receive it; anybody who completes a bounty not only learns a bit more about java than they did before, but they also help the community! ;-)

6) Fix the time format

7) Improve width distribution between the 3 columns. Now the 'PM to:' column is way too wide, wastes space that could be spent on the chat itself.

8) Window decorations. Please give it a title and an icon, so that it blends in more with the other programs.

Yeah, that too.

Lets make that
6) Look and Feel - includes all of bartjan's suggestions; worth 150k to the person who feels like making the client more coherent, better looking, and thus easier to use.

Does anyone have an idea how to set the window size for the chat on startup?
Something like "-geometry 770x535+0-31", but which my java doesn't understand.

Erm, I think I hard code this in one of the init methods. Lets make number 6 include all these various user interface niggles shall we ;-)

And, uh, bump.