Prominent changes
Adium 1.4.4 should fix Facebook Chat connectivity as well as a crash when installing an Xtra from the website.

Support and development
As always, if you find a bug or have a question, please refer to the Help page.

…And if you’d like to help us out in any way, feel free to find out how you can contribute.

What’s next?
Meanwhile, 1.5 is coming along nicely.

Here are a few of the more prominent changes:

Facebook Chat
Facebook will now connect via the officially-sanctioned mechanism (Facebook page on the API).  You no longer have to provide Adium with your username and password; when you first log in, you will be prompted to authenticate via a facebook.com window. Existing Facebook Chat accounts are upgraded automatically.

MSN
We reverted Adium 1.4.2′s change to libpurple’s MNP16 support from MSNP15. This should fix direct file transfers, user icons, and receiving custom emoticons, while disabling multiple points of presence (MPOP). We determined that this was the better trade-off based on user feedback.

Other important changes
We also fixed Twitter connectivity for many, a common crash, and activated the overlay scrollers for Lion.

Support and development
As always, if you find a bug or have a question, please refer to the Help page.

…And if you’d like to help us out in any way, feel free to find out how you can contribute.

Onward to 1.5!

• a frequent MSN crash
• an MSN issue adding contacts
• an MSN connection problem involving the error “Signed in from another location”
• ICQ losing connection without showing
• Hang when opening a chat window to a contact with a malformed log

Message style improvements
We have also addressed the complaints about the focus indication we added to the bundled message styles for the 1.4 release. They are now only shown in group chats and the indicators for Mockie have been redone.

For more details on the changes in Adium 1.4.2, you can read the release notes.

Libpurple tradeoff
However, you will find that on MSN the following features do not work in Adium 1.4.2:

• direct file transfers
• user icons
• receiving custom emoticons

We had to decide whether we wanted to update libpurple, the library which provides network-level connectivity for most services in Adium, to fix the major three MSN issues mentioned at the top and we decided that is was worth it despite these feature regressions it brings.

*Clarification: These features are currently broken in 1.4.2. They were not removed. We didn’t decide to throw them out. It’s simply that they are broken in the included version of libpurple. We had to make a decision between updating to fix a large number of other bugs while knowing these 3 would be broken, or leaving them untouched and leaving several services COMPLETELY broken for a number of our users. We chose to do the most good for the most people. It was one or the other.*

Where’s Facebook migration?
We originally intended to offer a migration path from the old to the new implementation of Facebook Chat in Adium 1.4.2. However, the implementation isn’t ready yet and with the many major issues already fixed in 1.4.2 we decided to push Facebook migration to 1.4.3. So for now, if you have problems with Facebook, you’ll have to manually switch as outlined here: http://trac.adium.im/wiki/FacebookChat.

Support and development
As always, if you find a bug or have a question, refer to the Help page.

And if you’d like to help us out in any way, feel free to find out how you can contribute.

What’s next?

• Twitter connection issues (for Adium 1.4.3; see the Help page for details)
• Facebook migration (for Adium 1.4.3)

While the primary purpose of this update is to fix ICQ authentication[1][2], we stuck a few other goodies in there as well. (Did someone say ‘faster MSN file transfers’? ) We’ve upgraded from libpurple 2.6.6 to version 2.7.5 which brings with it the usual smörgåsbord of fixes and enhancements. For more details, you can read the release notes.

What’s up with ICQ?

For those that are unaware, ICQ is no longer owned by AOL. The breakage that users may have experienced was due to the change-over to the new authentication servers.

Users of Mac OS X 10.4 using Adium 1.3.10 can change the server setting to “login.icq.com” in the “Options” pane of their ICQ account’s settings.

SSL encryption is currently not supported server-side so we were forced to disable it in Adium 1.4.1.

Support and development

As always, if you find a bug or have a question, refer to the Help page. Please do not post it in the comments.

And if you’d like to help us out in any way, feel free to find out how you can contribute.

What’s next?

The next big issues on our list:

• fixing Facebook Chat support
• finding a solution to complaints about the changes made to the default message styles in 1.4

The contact list now supports contacts in multiple groups and instant searching in any configuration. This update also brings a better authorization window, updated and revamped message styles, new customization options, an updated version of libpurple, faster launch time, less memory usage, and better performance are just the tip of the King Eider iceberg. The full, staggering list of enhancements and bug fixes may be found in the full list of changes.

This is definitely our best release yet, and just think of what’s to come!

To celebrate the release of Adium 1.4, we’re also introducing official Adium apparel. You can pick any color Adiumy and sport it on any color t-shirt, plus some sharp long sleeve t’s and a hoodie. We’ve prepared a few stylish combinations in the merchandise store for you. Shirts come in men’s, women’s, and dog’s styles. The revenue from your purchase directly supports Adium.

Adium T-shirts!

Questions or comments? Got a cool idea for a new shirt configuration you want to see? Let us know!

Adium is an open source, volunteer, community effort. Want to see faster releases? See how you can help out by contributing code, assistance, or resources on our development page. You can also choose to donate, since we’ve joined Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit, it’s even tax-deductible.

We’re thankful to Network Redux for their immense server resources, and CacheFly for their staggering bandwidth. Without them, none of this would be possible.

As we’ve noted before, 1.4 will require Leopard. Those of you who are still hanging on to Tiger are currently stuck, as we do not yet have a fixed version for you. We’ll release a 1.3.5 shortly after Libpurple 2.5.7 comes out, as that version will also contain the fix. (Libpurple, for those of you who don’t know, is the library Adium uses to connect to Yahoo! and most other services.) The Adium 1.4 betas use pre-release versions of Libpurple 2.6.