Trac now allows registration for bug reporting and feature requests, at long last. Registration is required but does not demand more than a username and password. An email address may optionally be included when registering for email notification of ticket changes without revealing your address to spammers.
We hope this change will streamline interaction with you all via Trac in a spamfree and friendly environment 🙂
In the previous entry about the Adium icon, we had a person anonymously add this comment, which I would like to address:
2. It is not obvious (http://www.jasperhauser.nl/weblog/2006/07/obviousness.html). What does a duck have to do with messaging?
Actually, Adiumy (the nickname given to the icon) is a messenger bird, specifically here is the definition you should look at:
1. One who bears a message; the bearer of a verbal or written communication, notice, or invitation, from one person to another, or to a public body; specifically, an office servant who bears messages.
I’d say this has a lot to do with with messaging. As to the other point this poster made:
1. It reflects poorly on the application as something polished. I know plenty of people who have downloaded adium, seen the icon and trashed the program immediately figuring that no polished app would have such a silly icon.
Honestly, if they can’t get over the icon then I don’t know what to tell you. For instance, with 1.0 we’ll have (and these are from the changelog, which will be posted on sites all around):
Consulted the Vorlon
Added a contextual menu to make sandwiches tastier.
Added more popcorn to the general preferences.
Given away a rather awesome french toast recipe (passed down through hundreds of generations, guard it with your life!)
Given all of these things (and there’s a lot more), you have to wonder what kind of wackiness the Adium Group is doing. Well, to be honest, we’re having fun. We all love Adiumy, we know that he’s a messenger bird, and he’s a mascot as well. He’s very well recognized, and you can pick him out on your dock, which adds to usability for people with vision problems.
We’ve also had a lot of very talented people make some very different types of dock icons, all based on Adiumy. There were so many that I was able to make a very large desktop background (modified from someone elses) that encompassed some of the birds.
You have to realize something. We’re having fun, we’re doing this for free, and that fun rubs off. Developers continue on the Adium Project long after their initial goals have been reached because they’re having fun doing it.
Two more points and I’m done. If you are complaining that a duck does not mean anything to Adium, you need to look at the names for Adium prior to Adium X:
Look at that second one. It’s actually “AIM DUCK” mashed together.
Last point, I promise. Nobody has ever attempted to show us any alternative. So even if we did want to move away from Adiumy, nobody has formally presented us with an alternative. Given that Adam Betts has updated the duck, and it looks way better, I’d say it’d be rather tough to convince us. But nobody has ever tried to that I can remember (been with the project what, 2, 3 years?). Without someone stepping up to present us with an alternative, we have no choice but to continue to use Adiumy.
When Skyler Cohen showed this image to everyone, I thought it was really awesome. It shows where we’ve been and where we’re going.
The messenger bird icon we’ve had has always been a point of contention for some folks. The “zombie duck” as I like to call the first one got replaced by the “classic style” duck. Then we have old Adium and new Adiumy (the two images on the right).
Overall though, the duck has been a good mascot and has worked well for us for years. It’s drawn sharp criticism by some, and love and affection by others. You have to know you are doing something right if you get that kind of reaction.
In either case, just thought I’d show this to everyone.
So not this Saturday, but the next, I’ll be giving a talk in Austin for CocoaDevHouse
It’ll be on Adium and Growl and will have some app demos for GlowingBulb (the stuff Evan and I have been working on for a while).
Go take a look, and list yourself if you can attend:
So if you need access to trac, you can log in with:
username: adium
password: adium
We will not be turning anonymous access back on, but do have a plan to allow users to register for accounts at some point. It’ll probably be 3-4 weeks before we get a chance to take a good look at it though.
In the meantime, this and the forums are both places to report issues. If you post to the forums, please keep beta issues in the beta forums.
We’ve just had a major flood of spammers which are somehow getting around the spam filters we had in place on Trac. Until we can solve the problem, anonymous bug / feature request submission will be disabled. We hope to have a fix in place within the week.
This post is about how the support infrastructure works. We have in place a bunch of different ways to contact us for support:
– The forums
– Trac ticket system
– Email
– Blog comments
But there are a bunch of questions people have. A lot of people ask:
Why haven’t the Adium devs fixed the squirrels!
Well, not really squirrels, so replace the word “squirrels” with a problem.
Most of the time when we don’t see an issue, we don’t fix it. So that’s why getting issues to us in a way that we can try to reproduce them is great. Screenshots, detailed steps, etc.
Does everyone remember “the aim problem from last week”? Good, we’re going to use it as an example from here on out.
So whenever you have a problem, say, “the aim problem from last week”, we absolutely need you to do a few things:
1) Figure out if it’s an issue that needs discussion, or if it’s one that needs to just be fixed.
Issues that need discussion are probably best to be posted on the forums.
Issues that just need a fix are probably best to be posted to trac.
If you don’t know, post to the forums.
(the rest assumes you are going to trac)
2) Do a search!
We get at least 15 duplicate tickets per day on all sorts of issues. Well, at least it feels that way. It’s understandable if you can’t find a ticket, but we have over 5000 tickets so more than likely your issue is in there somewhere.
3) Read the ticket. This includes comments.
Guys/Gals, we don’t need 50 people telling us that their aim connection is no longer working, with the same exact symptoms. If you have new info, we need that, but otherwise just continue watching the ticket.
4) Follow the Reporting Bugs page.
Do a search, you’ll find it.
Anyhow, hope this helps.
Oh ya, one more thing:
Comments in the blog are less likely to be worked if the issue is in trac/on the forums. But comments are indeed welcome. 🙂
We don’t ordinarily do blog posts about betas, but I thought I’d follow up to the previous post by pointing out that 1.0b9 is now up. Besides the AIM thing, there are two other things on the changelog worth mentioning:
A lot of our Chinese users have been waiting for QQ support for a long time. As for custom emoticons, they’re not working perfectly yet (when we receive one, the message view doesn’t auto-scroll the way that it should), but they are working. I’ll throw out an informal prediction that it will be completely fixed by b10.
Happy beta-testing, and please report those bugs!
For those keeping score at home, the problem with AIM in Adium 1.0 beta stemmed from overexcitedness on the beta’s part. AIM imposes a “rate limit” which prevents clients from sending too much data too quickly. We were effectively ignoring that rate limit during the sign on process.
That was well and good (sic), except that an AIM server upgrade, unrelated to Adium or any other third party client, occurred on Thursday of this past week. That upgrade included stricter rate limiting requirements, which pushed Adium 1.0 beta over the edge. After the upgrade, users whose buddy lists required significant information requests during sign on — large number of buddies, many away buddies with away messages, many buddies with buddy icons — were summarily kicked during sign on.
We’ve fixed the problem for 1.0b9, which will be available in the next 24 hours. 🙂
There are some Aim issues that are happening which fall under the following criteria:
1) Your account needs to have a significant amount of buddies listed on it.
2) You are using the Beta.
If you have both then you’ll see that your aim account is signing off and on at random times until you get kicked off of the Aim servers.
We are quite aware of the issue, and are working on a resolution. In the mean time, .89.1 works, along with iChat and other Aim clients.
Remember folks, this is a beta.
We’re seeing more reports than we need on this issue right now. If you have information on how to fix this we could use that, otherwise we don’t need anymore comments that this is happening to you as well.
We’ve had this problem reported in this locations:
http://forums.cocoaforge.com/viewtopic.php?t=8934
http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/5193
http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/4457
http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/5182
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/08/17/aol-breaks-adium-betas/
http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/4290
In other words, a lot of places. Please do not open any new tickets, and until we close them all as resolved and release a new beta please do not reopen the tickets if we close them.
Thanks.
