
                                        Clist Nicer modified
                                        --------------------

This is a modification of the original clist_nicer, written by Pixel based on
Mirandas classic contact list with added skinning features.

The following things were changed by me:
----------------------------------------

* ability to show client icons in the contact list. Does only work with the ICQJ or
  ISee protocols for Miranda.

* ability to show extended status icons and modes.

* ability to show visibility icons in the contact list. A read eye means that you've
  set this contact on your INVISIBILITY list (ICQ jargon) or the contact has been
  blocked (MSN or Yahoo). You'll never be visible to this contact. A green eye means
  that you've put this contact on your VISIBLE list, so you'll always be visible to
  him/her, no matter what your status is (unless, you're really offline, of course).
  Note that such "explicitely visible" lists do not exist in all protocols - it's
  basically an "icq thing".

* Added a toolbar for some commonly used operations. Check the tooltips on the toolbar
  for more information.

* added 2 buttons at the bottom for a "ICQ style" look. The left one opens the main menu
  and the right one opens the status menu.

* added some items to the contact list context menu (RIGHT click the contact list while
  the pointer is NOT hovering a contact or its icon). The menu allows you to quickly
  enable/disable some of the new features.

* added codepage encoding for nicknames on the contact list. Currently, you can only set
  "per contact" codepages with tabSRMM. If a codepage is present, it will be used to
  encode the nickname. The result will be a widestring (unicode).

* ability to show avatars and extended user information, like status
  messages, on the contact list

* multiwindow and genmenu support.


                REQUIREMENTS:
                ============

* Miranda IM 0.8.1.x or later
* Windows 2000 or later (ANSI version may work on Windows 98/SE, but this is totally
  unsupported)..

                INSTALLATION:
                =============

* Copy the .DLL to your miranda Plugins folder, while Miranda is not running.

                A FEW PERFORMANCE TIP
                =====================

Clist_nicer+ can be graphic intense so it has the potential to eat quite some CPU
cycles. This shouldn't be a problem on modern systems as they are generally fast
enough, no matter what settings you apply. On slower systems, however, a few
rules may improve performance significantly.

* don't overuse the "overlay" skin items. All the odd/even/first/last/single skin
  items use overdrawing to get the desired effect. This can easily double or even
  triple the required calculations for color and transparency mixing, applying
  shapes (rounded corners) and more. It gets even worse when each item has alpha
  values less than 100%.

* avoid the setting "Inherit transparency from background items" in the avatar
  section of the "Advanced options" page. Transparent images need to be rendered
  using the AlphaBlend() API which is slower than StretchBlt(). Additionally,
  AlphaBlend()'s image rescaling "quality" is crappy. As a workaround, clist_nicer+
  uses 2-stage rendering - it uses AlphaBlend() for applying transparency (both constant
  and per-pixel) on the *unscaled* image and then renders the final image using
  StretchBlt(). So the setting for transparent avatars can really hurt on slower
  machines (but the 2-stage rendering does improve quality, of course).

* avoid disabling the "Scroll with text" option for a background image. It can really
  hurt the scrolling performance with smooth scrolling enabled.

* avoid active view modes when you connect and your contact list is still empty. The
  view mode filtering requires additional processing time, and when you connect
  multiple protocols and a few dozen contacts are coming online, this can be notice-
  able, even on faster machines.


                SUPPORT:
                ========

Direct all your questions at my forum at http://www.miranda.or.at/forums/ This is also
the support forum for my other plugin (tabSRMM)

License: This program is licensed under the terms of the GNU gneral public license
         Version 2 or any later version.

         You should find a copy of the license in this archive, if you cannot find it,
         please visit http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html


Copyrights: This program is based on the work of others. The original clist code is
            copyrighted by the Miranda IM development team (http://www.miranda-im.org).
            Most of the skinning modifications were written by Pixel.

            The toolbar icons were made by Angeli-Ka. Thanks for permission to use them :)
            ICQ client icons also (C) by Angeli-Ka.
            Overlay status icons made by Faith, permission to use them was granted. Thanks :)

Contact: MSN & email: silvercircle AT gmail DOT com
         http://miranda.or.at

