Purrito

Things I miss in Mumble 1.2

So about a year ago I installed a server in my basement. Around the same time me and my friends started a guild in World of Warcraft, so I installed a Mumble server (or murmur as the server is called) so we could speak with each others, even though I was using a Mac.

Now the people behind Mumble have released a beta of Mumble 1.2 and I decided to try it out. First of all, I love that they redesigned the serverlist, before people always forgot to save when they added new custom servers. Now they separated the custom server-list and the Add-window. I also like that you can chat in the main window, and that you finally can add comments like in Ventrilo.

Since it’s still beta, I decided to write a post about some things that I hope they can fix before the beta ends, or at least consider fixing sometime in the future.

This is what the main window in Mumble looks like right now, on OS X. Here’s a larger screenshot. If you aren’t used to the OS X interface, this maybe doesn’t look to bad for you, but there’s something in this picture that annoys me a lot: the border on focused controls.

When you select i.e. a name in the list on the right the whole list gets a glow. Most applications remove this glow when controls are placed this close to each other, but in Mumble it’s still there. I don’t know if this is because of the framework they’re using (Qt) but I really hope they can remove it, that would be great.

Also, the log (where you see chat, when people join the server and such) has some kind of border too. Same thing there, it would be great if it could be removed. I photoshopped the earlier screenshot so you could see what I mean:

It’s a little bit sharper now, right? It’s all about the details.

Another thing I would like to talk about is the icons for “Flags”. An authorized user gets a green A, if you have a comment you get a C and if you are a friend with someone that person gets a heart.

I don’t think these icons are final, but I want to leave a comment about them anyways, since they look pretty out of place right now. It would be great if they matched the channel and user-icons in style. Also, I don’t think letters are a good way to represent stuff. I’ve had a lot of users that thought the A (or A+ as it looked like before) meant that the users were admins. I think a classic user-icon would be a better way to represent authorized users. And maybe a user-icon with different colors for different groups.

Sneaky bug-report: If users have “textures”, you can hover their names to see these textures. This works for a few seconds on the OS X-version, then the tooltip fades away and you have to inactivate and focus the Mumble-window to see them again.

Also, I’ve seen that they made an OS X-version of the Overlay plugin, but I haven’t tried it out yet. It doesn’t work with Heroes of Newerth as far as I know, and that’s the only game I’ve been playing lately. Does it work at all?