Banter Frequently Asked Questions

Do you have a question about Banter you think would be beneficial for everyone to know the answer? If so, please add your question to the end of the list. We (the developers of Banter) are subscribed to this page and will post an answer as soon as we can.

Q. There seem to be a variety of IM clients out there, why are you building another one?

A. Banter's focus is on collaboration with people. One method of collaboration is IM. Banter will initially be focused on the big three: Video, Audio, and Text chats. Banter's user experience will be around people (not buddies from specific services) and all the ways you work with them. Future collaboration methods may include email, blogs, photo sharing, whiteboarding, teaming, web conferencing, etc. Banter's goal is not to implement all of these services and technologies, but bring them together so the data around the people you collaborate with is all brought together.

Q. Where'd the name "Banter" come from?

A. In the dictionary banter is defined as "...to speak to or address in a witty and teasing manner"... hmm. Kudos to RobertLove for the name suggestion!

Q. Why are you building Banter instead of participating in the ______ Project (Gaim/Empathy/etc.)?

A. Banter is built on the telepathy project. Banter is not trying to re-invent the wheel but provide collaborative user experience on existing frameworks. Telepathy is a well supported project that provides the flexibility Banter needs to bring together a large set of collaborative services (the Collabora hackers ROCK!).

There are several attempts currently at building clients on Telepathy. We chose to start a new project because we didn't want the user experience to end up being like existing IM clients. Our focus is on people and all of their collaborative tools. We also have set a rapid development schedule and hope to have our first release coincide with openSUSE 10.3. With such a complete framework in telepathy, we felt we could be meet our goals by starting Banter.

Q. Why are you using C#/Mono

A. It ROCKS! Essentially, rapid development with C# is easy. It's relatively easy for newcomers to come in (provided we've coded well enough).

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