Zac West, developer and webmaster of Adium for the past several years, has been doing a fantastic job during the development cycle of Adium 1.4, not just with coding (including our upcoming Twitter and IRC support) but also with resource maintenance, organization, and direction. He has shown admirable dedication to this free, open source project, to the great benefit of the one million Adium users worldwide.

It’s my pleasure, with the support of the rest of the Adium development team, to name him co-lead developer of the Adium project, changing my own title to the same in the process.

Congratulations are in order! I look forward to the great places Zac will help us take Adium in the future.

Adium 1.3.5 is now available, with the aforementioned features of the release candidate. Enjoy!

Howdy folks. We’ve posted a release candidate for 1.3.5rc1. I don’t want to deal with having two betas simultaneously, so we’re keeping it short and simple here on the blog. The only changes are in libpurple and the Facebook chat plugin. Please respond here with any issues specifically related to 1.3.5 over 1.3.4.

1.3.5rc1.dmg (MD5 ba46df4857871bfa5eed3170f0961b05)

Libpurple changes in 2.5.7:

• Yahoo Protocol 16 support, including new HTTPS login method; this should fix a number of login problems that have recently cropped up. (Sulabh Mahajan, Mike “Maiku” Ruprecht)
• Only display the AIM “Unable to Retrieve Buddy List” message once per connection. (Rob Taft)
• Blocking MSN users not on your buddy list no longer disconnects you.
• When performing operations on MSN, assume users are on the MSN/Passport network if we don’t get network ID’s for them. [this fixes adding/removing and getting disconnected]

pidgin-facebookchat changes in 1.51:

• Fix idle status of buddies
• Less disconnects for people with large friends lists
• gzip compression for smaller page downloads
• Fixes for notifications for non-English users
• Display messages sent from website in Pidgin
• Inbox count display
• Usernames and/or passwords with utf-8 characters should work now
• Display *bold* and _underline_ formatting in incoming messages
• Memleak fixes
• Proxy server fixes
• Fixed some crashes on disconnect
• Fixes some buddy's appearing offline when they weren't
• New channel finding code, should mean less conflicts with Facebook website

In case you haven’t notice, we’ve now joined our aviary brethren on the .im ccTLD. adium.im is now our new domain name! Everything redirects from adiumx.com, so you don’t have to worry about any problems during the transition (updates, RSS feeds, etc).

Quack on!

A distributed version control system makes branching and merging significantly easier. In other words, simplifying these two things makes it significantly less time consuming to work on 1.4.1 while also working on 1.5; sharing changes between two separate branches is often a problem.

It took a lot of debate, though not all that recently, for us to finally decide to switch to Mercurial for our version control needs. I’m really enjoying it so far; it’s fast, it’s efficient and it’s easy to grasp. There’s a few issues we’ve run into, but hopefully we can figure out solutions. Right now the main concern is the fact that our binary copy of libpurple in the source code is significantly impacting the size of the repository.

You can now find our Mercurial repositories at hg.adiumx.com. We’ve written up a small amount of documentation so far on acquiring the newest Adium source and on getting Mercurial. The latter is very, very easy on Leopard, and slightly harder on Tiger. Our repositories are, as always , being hosted by our awesome friends at Network Redux on a new server setup we’re getting ready to use.

The great part about using a distributed VCS is that every single person’s copy of the repository is a full-fledged copy of the repository; the only difference between the server’s repository and yours is that the server has scripts set up to trigger events, and it’s a trusted source for nightlies and other fun things. This makes it very easy to continue development during or recover from a significant server outage. Should the worst occur, we could easily restore our server records based on developer repositories, if need be.

To that end, I’m happy to say that our two main repositories, adium (currently 1.4) and adium-1.3 (1.3.x development) are now mirrored hourly at Bitbucket, a service which quite a few of our developers use for their personal source code needs.

Our old SVN access is now read-only; all information on our SVN server is now available through our mercurial repositories, except one or two insignificant, non-working plugins. No future commits will occur in SVN (in fact, trunk and branches/adium-1.3 currently have #errors in them to intentionally prevent use), so you should transition anything that uses them over to Mercurial. Enjoy.

Howdy folks! Just dropped in to say: we now control our own Twitter account! Follow us and send us nice messages.

And yes, 1.4 is coming along nicely. Group chat support is amazing now, IRC is going great, and Twitter is almost completed. Lots of changes are in!

A major annoyance in instant messaging is the amount of spam prevalent in the Yahoo and MSN networks these days. Largely because of the “email as contact name” paradigm, these contact addresses are easily scrapped from websites. We don’t like it any more than you do.

In an attempt to combat this, I’ve created a plugin called Challenge/Response. It works by hiding messages from unknown users until the user answers a question you have picked. For example, you can set your message as, “What is the square root of 49 in numerical form?” Until the unknown user answers “7″ all of their messages are hidden from you. 

Unknown users are those not on your contact list, not in the C/R white-list, and those you do not have a chat window open for. If set to do so, C/R will log the messages you receive to a group chat. It can also hide messages from all blocked users, for protocols like MSN where blocking only hides status information.

Since spam bots can’t read the challenge, it’s unlikely for them to respond and get past the filtering system. The downside is that people who want to talk to you for the first time may be confused or unable to answer; by making your challenge and response easier, you can avoid this problem.

Challenge/Response isn’t being included as part of Adium because it’s more of a band-aid than an actual solution, and because presenting it as a third-party plugin allows it a few luxuries that being a core part of Adium wouldn’t allow it. Eventually I’d like to see some sort of intelligent filter which is able to tell the difference between spam and non-spam messages, possibly with something like a Bayesian filter used by e-mail clients.

If you run into any bugs, or have any suggestions, feel free to make a comment here or on the Xtras page for the plugin. Since we don’t have an in-app way of updating plugins yet, check back on the site every once in a while to make sure you’re using the latest version. Enjoy.

The Wall Street Journal is running an article entitled “Making IM Services Play Well Together” that features a review of Adium and other applications that allow you to use multiple IM accounts simultaneously.

Adium, www.adiumx.com, wins points for cuteness. The downloaded program is represented by a goofy, green duck, which plops itself in the Mac operating system dock and closes its eyes when not in use. When new messages are received via Adium, this duck flaps its wings until you open the message. The Adium user interface incorporates sleek visuals, such as status windows that gracefully float above user names whenever a cursor moves over these names.

On behalf of the Adium team, I’d like to welcome Ryan Govostes, our newest developer, to the project. No longer must I sleep with the light on, shivering in terror at PPC disassembly. Ryan has been contributing to the project for several years, contributing both code and expertise, and I’m personally thrilled to have him on board.

Mazel tov, Ryan

As of May 13th, 2008 AIHyperlinks, the framework responsible for Adium’s link detection, has been renamed to AutoHyperlinks and set free.

The framework has officially been relicensed under the modified BSD license, allowing Mac developers – large and small – to use our framework in their own projects, both open and closed source, for their hyperlink gathering and autolinkification needs.

So, I’d like to challenge you, Mac developers: changing all the http://’s from a string into links is the most obvious use for it, but I’m really curious what the Mac developer community at large can do with our little framework.

Interested? Read our AutoHyperlinks wiki page, grab the source, give back (if you’d like), and have at it!