Adium doesn't handle URLs from other applications consistantly

Can you show how you are dragging this? Just showing it in the message window doesn't fully explain the differences

Grab the icon next to the URL (it'll either be the site icon or the generic icon for that browser) and drag it to the textinput widget in a message window. If your web browser uses a document window (OmniWeb does, Safari doesn't) you can also grab the document icon in the title bar and drag for the same effect. The URL you dragged over will be inserted into the textinput widget for sending to the other user.

In NetNewsWire grab an article from the headline list and drag it into the textinput widget again. This time a link will be inserted, with the text of the link being the article's headline and the link itself pointing to the URL for the article.

If you do these same actions with iChat instead of Adium you will see the inconsistency. Specifically, when dragging from a web browser to iChat, a link with the text being the title of the Web Page and the target being the URL is created. The NetNewsWire behavior is consistent between Adium and iChat.

I can make a movie demonstrating this if you can recommend some software that actually works. Screenography doesn't seem to work (it says it saves the file, but I can't locate it, either in the place I specify or the default location.) Otherwise I can upload a movie made with a digital camera, but not for a while when I go into work and get the cable for my camera.

To clarify what you're seeing in the screenshot:

The first message is being sent from Adium to iChat and has no relevance. The second message is a link dragged from OmniWeb to iChat, to show that it inserts a link instead of only a URL. The third message is the same link dragged from OmniWeb to Adium, to show that it inserts only a URL instead of a link.

I've noticed this too. I think it may have something to do with NNW though. Drag an article from NNW to Terminal.app for example and the text is just a link. If you drag it to TextEdit or Adium, it does a formatted link with description. I'm guessing Adium doesn't know what to do with that.

SnapzProX can can capture movies, but I understand what you're saying. I'm not sure why this is a huge problem. Personally, I prefer the link itself to be inserted. pages often have uninformative titles.

I agree with cbarrett regarding titles being uninformative.

Pages often have uninformative titles, yes, but that's the way other OSX apps work. I prefer consistency, myself. Also, you can drag the link over and clarify the title yourself, if need be.

At any rate, the point of the bug entry is that Adium's behavior is inconsistent. It behaves one way when you drag a link from NNW and another way when you drag a link from other applications. In order to promote consistency between Adium and other OSX applications it should probably insert the link during a drag operation. If you want only the URL you can use copy and paste.

Another option is to have a preference setting for which way Adium should behave when an object is dragged into an open chat. Following the principle of least astonishment it should probably default to inserting the link and users who desire only the url can change that.

More information on this.

It seems the behavior I'm seeing may be a difference between 10.3 and 10.4. I'm running 10.3 here and was talking to a friend who's using 10.4. We're both using Adium 0.84.

When he drags a link from Safari or OmniWeb into Adium it has the desired behavior, where the link with title is inserted instead of the URL only.

Later today I'll try downloading the source and compiling it locally to see if the problem still exists. If it doesn't then the behavior may only exist when compiling Adium on 10.4 and running on 10.3.

Is there anyone else running 10.3 that can confirm this behavior?

If the title is uninformative, you can copy/paste the URL from the address bar, and viola, no uninformative title, just pure link.

But without the support for this normal/consistent behavior, you can't really get around it. i.e. I can click the Link button in Adium, but, there's no easy way in any browser to copy/paste the title (yes, I could view the source, find <title>, select/copy/paste, but does everybody know how to do that?). So I have to manually type the title in and then copy/paste the URL.

So, besides breaking consistency across other applications, you're also making it more difficult for people who want the title, than for those who don't.

Working fine in 1.0