Vertical IM tabs in communicator

It occured to me that it may make sense to have the IM tabs in the communicate window stack vertically rather than horizontally. This means that a tall but narrow communicate window can be used for supporting multiple concurrent IMs as well as being suitable for viewing a long list of friends or groups.

A screenshot can be found in jira: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3265

Matthew

Yes, it makes sense from a "create a tab for a conversation" point of view.

However I like to see only the last two or three things said in a conversation at once, as anything older than that is, well, old and I don't need to keep looking at it.

Don't know about you though, but I'd rather have my IM window SHORT and WIDE.

It would be good as an option.

Personally I would love to be able to have a bar to one side with all my tabs there which I can just click to have them pop-out into my friends list, or an IM window etc.

My only thought is that this would require chat windows to be changed slightly, as a narrow window would result in short messages requiring new lines which would be messy, purely because avatar names take up space. This could be address by other GUI changes though, for example, each person who speaks being assigned a unique, random (readable) colour, and when you hover over any of their now coloured messages you'd get a tool-tip with their name.

But yeah, a vertical window would be a good step in the right direction, at least for me. Other users may prefer other things as Draco18s points out.

I wonder if this could be achieved by making the tab-bar a component of the communicate window that can be dragged around within the window? For example, you could have the tabs underneath, or on top, or on the right side, rather than just the left as you did in your mock-up.