the final XChat needs some sort of notification (maybe color change or small icon) when a message is received/read.
It definitely will have notifications.
That is great,
but have another request/question for the XChat, do we really need the address and the public key as destination?
After all, its not called a public key for nothing
I have some clarification on this:
The public key is used to encrypt messages sent to a given address. So you need it if you want the message to be private.
Here's a summary of the mechanism:
- User A wants to send a message to user B
- User A gets public key of user B
- User A encrypts a packet which has his own public key and sends to user B
- Only user B can decrypt, since the private key of user B is required to decode a message encrypted with user B's public key
- Now user B has user A's public key, and can encrypt and send back a message.
So addresses are analogous to phone numbers, and in order to secure the communication, a public key is needed.
it could also be some real world adoption type news. What ever happened to our two guys from the XC foundation? What are they doing? We haven't heard from them since that one day they were introduced... 
