annotate plugins/CRAZY @ 780:c714def9cebb

[gaim-migrate @ 790] You may be a geek if... You've ever used a computer on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of the same weekend. You find yourself interrupting computer store salesman to correct something he said. The first thing you notice when walking in a business is their computer system. ...and offer advice on how you would change it. You've ever mounted a magnetic tape reel. You own any shareware. You know more IP addresses than phone numbers. You've ever accidentally dialed an IP address. Your friends use you as tech support. You've ever named a computer. You have your local computer store on speed dial. You can't carry on a conversation without talking about computers. Co-workers have to E-mail you about the fire alarm to get you out of the building. You've ever found "stray" diskettes when doing laundry. Your computer has it's own phone line - but your teenager doesn't. You check the national weather service web page for current weather conditions (rather than look out the window). You know more URLs than street addresses. Your pet has a web page. You get really excited when Yahoo adds your link. committer: Tailor Script <[e-mail]>

Figure out a user's IP address if they have the same plugin loaded

	This would be a really interesting and pretty useful plugin. It
	could work possibly by sending  'hidden' text in the form of an
	HTML tag or something, and if it receives the same hidden text,
	it could then pass messages back  and forth to send and receive
	the IP addresses.

Perform extra HTML-highlighting and HTML-stripping

	Ever get annoyed because gaim doesn't support some HTML markup?
	Here's a work-around. (Although, if you're this determined, you
	might as well just hack gaim and send us the patches ;-) .)

Auto-reply

	If someone sends you a message, immediately send them a message
	back. Add fun things  to the message. Reverse their  text, then
	send it back to them. Play with fonts and colors and HTML tags.
	Really annoy the hell out of them. :-)

Control gaim by monitoring a file

	I have to admit, I blatently stole  this idea from LICQ. But it
	is a really  interesting concept. What happens is it  watches a
	certain file to see if it's empty or not. If it's not, it reads
	the contents and executes any commands stored in there (such as
	send a message to someone). This  can be nice for having remote
	control of gaim.


These are just some of the ideas I came up with in about ten minutes. A
really nice thing about having plugins  is as long as your code doesn't
segfault, you can keep testing and  debugging without having to restart
gaim. Plus the plugins tend to be small, and quick and easy to compile,
so development should be quick. Try to have FUN with these plugins :-).
(BTW, dibs on the 'control by file' plugin. :-) .)

Other useful ideas I came up with later:

-Auto-reconnect on kick
-Stock/News ticker (I don't want it, but some people do)
-Spell check

	This one watches what you're sending and replaces common misspelled
	words (e.g. teh -> the, u -> you, r -> are, etc.).

-Play games through the same gaim plugin

	This one I think is one of my crazier ideas that I would only come up
	with this early in the morning. This plugin would somehow determine if
	the other person is using the same plugin. If s/he is, it would allow
	the people to play a game against each other, like checkers. It could
	be done by watching the messages passed and intercepting ones that
	relate to the game/plugin. Conversation could even continue as usual.
	What gets really warped is then you could write plugins for that
	plugin for various games (checkers, chess, hearts (4 people!)). I have
	no desire of trying this one, help yourself.

There's going to be a few plugins that are going to ship with gaim by default
eventually, probably. This would be a good thing to put in the PATCHES thing
over at sourceforge.net, if you write one. Most plugins are probably only going
to be one short file, which is probably how most of them should be (some short
little hack to do the auto-reconnect thing, for example. That can probably be
done in about 10-15 lines).