Shoutbox

Mood feature

The idea is that while you chat, you should also be able to show your current mood. This can be done by adding a semi-transparent emoticon behind the messages. Along with the emoticon the message background should also slightly colorize.

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2


In ss2 you will notice that there are two mood backgrounds in the same chat window. This is because in my oppinion it shouldn't be window-bound but message-bound, meaning the mood you set is for the message and not for the chat session. Successive messages inherit the previous mood until a new mood is set ((OPTIONAL)or after a set amount of messages after which the mood "fades out").

And one more thing. In future, it will be nice for moods to be available for customization, meaning any custom emoticon can be turned onto "mood". People will only need to supply the emoticon in a good quality if they want it to be bigger (cause emoticon-size won't be a pleasant one) and then choose the background color for the mood.

I say "In future" because I realize the customization is not an easy thing to accomplish. You'll need to make the mood easily exportable and thus the moment one receives a new(unknown) mood, it is immediately imported. And though it can't be that hard to make a package of [Image, background_color] I doubt it's as easy as that.


I also realize this can probably be done with scripts but if it is just a custom script, this won't bring the feature to all people. In other words, you'll often find yourself in a position where the feature will be unavailable because the person you're chatting to doesn't have the script. I simply suggest you should include it by default so it can be a standard feature.