Changes under the hood
This release requires Mac OS X 10.6.8 and an Intel Mac. It is the first Adium release to feature 64-bit support. This means that you will need to update any plugins you have installed (notably Skype). As always, these can be found on our xtras site.

New icons
Bogdan Mihaiciuc contributed a great set of icons which you will notice all across Adium: in the preferences, in the chat window and in the Transcript Viewer.

Improved Transcript Viewer
The Transcript Viewer was polished to look native on modern versions of OS X. “Next”/”Previous” buttons were added for highlighted search terms within a transcript (similar to Safari). Stephen Holt completely rewrote the log indexer making indexing faster and searching more accurate.

Other various user interface improvements
Our dock icon now uses a shiny round badge when on Lion as well as better looking overlays. The “Get Info” window’s appearance was relieved of many visual glitches. The contact list’s icon menu has been updated to look native on recent versions of Mac OS X. The “About Adium” window was also updated (credits for its graphics go to Mike Houben & Paul Wilde).

Our iTunes and Address Book integration is more flexible and easier to configure using tokens.

Growl support
Adium 1.5 also includes a change to how we show notifications. The Growl application got a major update (version 1.3) and is available on the Mac App Store for $1.99. But, to allow you to still get notifications for free, we have enabled showing Growl notifications even if the application is not installed. This feature is called Mist:

You can fully customize when these notifications are shown. If you do not like them, you can turn them off in Preferences → Events. However, if you want to use a different skin or use some of the more advanced features of Growl, you will have to either buy the application from the Mac App Store, or get an older and free version from http://growl.info/downloads.

Libpurple changes
We have also updated libpurple to 2.10.0. Regrettably, that means we have had to remove support for QQ. QQ was removed from libpurple as it had not been updated and was known to not work for a long time, which left us no choice but to remove it as well. If you are brave, there is an unofficial plugin available on http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=8226 which aims to bring support back.

Support and development
As always, if you find a bug or have a question, please see the in-app help or the online Help page.

Adium is free, open source software. If you’d like to help us out in any way, please find out how you can contribute or donate to support the project.

Adium previously had two of its domains hosted via GoDaddy. As of today, these are being transferred to another registrar, gandi.net, who is donating $1 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for each transfer.

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!

I’ve been with Adium for almost 8 months now, starting from January 2011. Basically i’m working on everything I manage to grab , things that I find interesting or easy to fix, years old tickets and even reviewing contributors patches recently, though I have to admit that my main area of interest is Adium’s UI. I hope to bring new life to Adium by working on a new “better/fresher/cooler/-insert-a-great-word-here-” UI.

Other areas of interest would be: performance improvements, modern (latest) OS X tech, source code/project clean-up and lots of other interesting stuff.

Developing for Adium is great, learning new stuff everyday, great team, lots of new friends .

More about me (including contact info) on my wiki page here. Thanks!

I started contributing to Adium in May 2011 with a small bug fix. It really wasn’t anything big but the warm welcome of certain people immediately convinced me to stay with Adium.

Warm welcome? Yeah, I really like the friendly and occasionally engaged atmosphere surrounding our core team. I have already been given the (admittedly unofficial and not very popular) title “token master”, as I introduced the magic of token fields to our interfaces.

So what are my intentions? Basically, there are two main areas I want to deal with:

1. The first and primary goal is to clean up Adium. This does not only involve the UI but especially the source code.
2. The second goal is to get some new look to Adium but as you can imagine this is a rather big topic.

Apart from those topics I am really interested in the XMPP stack with all its facilities. But I still have to find something I can work on to satisfy this passion.

• 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)

I’m in the process of overhauling the Message Style Creation docs, including a shiny new tutorial and pages on how to modernize existing message style to take advantage of the spiffy new features in 1.4. I’ll make another blog post when that’s complete.

My main goals for Adium include making the transcript viewer easier to use (i.e. more reliable, less crash-y), updating parts of Adium from 2002 to, at least, 2007 to take advantage of current technologies, and polishing Adium’s look.

In my free time I really enjoy wearing my Adiumy shirts.

I’m Thijs Alkemade, a 21-year-old master student in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. I started working on Adium in the spring of 2010. As that was the first year I had enough free time to do so, I really wanted to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Sadly, the Adium project didn’t participate that year, but rather than giving up or looking for a different project, I decided I would just work on Adium anyway!

I got started by hanging out in the IRC channels, where I found listening to user questions and reports a much more motivating way of finding things to do than browsing through the endless amount of tickets in Trac. So while that means I’ve worked on a lot of different parts of Adium, IRC still remains my favorite part. And Adium’s IRC implementation could still use a bit of polish.

What really got me hooked on working on Adium was the talented developer team, the fact that not only that team, but the whole Adium community has a very friendly atmosphere, and of course it being the best open source application for Mac OS X! That’s why I’m very excited to be able to contribute to this application I love so much.