Adium - new way of listing contacts ... in a stack! Please help me accomplish this

[mgpg89]

I currently have all my contacts in Adium linked to their cards in Address Book ... all neatly tagged and supplied with clear pictures of their faces.
Instead of a full contacts list, I customized Adium to just show the pictures of the people's faces online on the left side of the screen (kinda like a dock) like you can see in the screenshot below.

Now what I want to do is, have a stack in my dock and when I click it, it would display all my online contacts (with their photos)

How do you guys think I could accomplish this?


Clicking a photo and causing it to open an IM window shouldn't be too hard. (I'm thinking Automator ... and img2icns to create little icons out of the pictures)

But how to group only my online contacts, seems a bit harder.
Maybe using a smart playlist, but what would the criteria be?


Can anyone help? Anyone ever tried anything similar? How do you manage your contacts list in Adium?

 

[mgpg89]

What I want to accomplish: (simplified)

An icon with a person's face (I can do that myself using img2icns)
When I click it, an Adium chat window opens (conversation with the person on the icon)


EDIT:
Alright, I made an Automator workflow / app. If I click it, it opens a chat window with that particular person in Adium (not fully optimized though .. takes about 3 seconds for the window to open)

Now I have to find a way to group the contacts that are online at that particular moment... Any idea?

 

[jive turkey]

Sorry, I can't help you by answering your question, but I like your idea. A stack with my friends' faces docked on the side would save me a lot screen real estate, and looks neat, too.

 

[mgpg89]

Everyone who's interested, check the attachment.
Inside the .zip archive, there's an Automator workflow.

Open it in Automator and change the variable to the IM address of the person you want to talk to in Adium... Then save it as an application.

If you run the application after you saved it, it SHOULD open an Adium chat window with that person.


Anyone got any ideas to make this workflow any better?
Anyone has other ideas to accomplish this a bit more easy?

Thanks in advance


(btw, you can change the icon of the app to display the contact's face using a free application called img2icns, providing you have a picture of that person of course)

 

[mgpg89]

Update:

Uploaded a slightly faster version. Now enter the IM Address in the top text field when you open the app with Automator (important you enter it correctly without any additional spaces etc)


Mind you I have no programming skills whatsoever, so I'm hoping someone comes along who does so we can forget about this whole Automator thing ... Unless there's a way of instantly launching the window using Automator, but I have yet to discover that.