Hi. I am Patrick Steinhardt, student in Computer Science at the Free University of Berlin (Germany) and a pretty new developer of Adium.

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.

Adium 1.4.2 is now available. It includes, among other improvements, fixes for the following major problems:

• 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)

Hi, I’m Matthew, and while I’ve been actively involved with Adium message styles and IRC support for several years, it’s only with 1.4 that my contributions increased to the point where people starting calling me names like “developer”. You can find a bit more personal info on my team page.

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.

I am Frank Dowsett and I have been a part of Adium’s community for nearing on 4 years now. I am a Computer Science student at Trent University in Canada with a diploma in Computer Engineering. I don’t remember how I came to be involved in Adium at the start, but now I’m the one making facetious comments in IRC (as wixardy).

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.

Hi!

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.

Whether you realize it or not, volunteers are the lifeblood of Adium. Every single one of us is a volunteer. All the work we do, we do for free. As such, it’s vital that we have a steady flow of willing contributors.

Some of you might have noticed that we have had some new faces lately. In the next few posts, we’d like to give some of those new faces a chance to introduce themselves. They all played a part in helping to get 1.4 out the door a few months ago.

Most of these guys have been around for months, if not years. Many were just fans of Adium and wanted to give back. There may be some of you out there who would like to do so as well. There’s always something to do. You don’t have to be an expert programmer to lend a hand; Even the best developer has to start somewhere. If you’d like to join our merry band of volunteers please take a look at our development page for more information.

Without further ado, I’d like to present our first introduction: Thijs Alkemade.

Hi folks,

Today, we launched a new Help section on the Adium website: http://adium.im/help. You will now be able to browse the same help content available in Adium (“Adium Help” in the Help menu) right from your browser. It should cover a lot of what you need to know about using Adium.

Additionally, there is a list of “hot issues” – known, commonly reported, recent problems that many people may be experiencing – for example, when a service has connectivity problems or requires you to change your settings (as was the case with Facebook Chat).

We are hoping that these pages will help solve some of the most common problems that you might run into while using Adium, and allow Trac to be reserved for development and other contributions instead of support.

Back when we announced the release of Adium 1.4, we also announced that you can now buy clothing with Adiumy on it.

Well, it’s been over two weeks. Your T-shirts, hoodies, and dog shirts should have arrived by now. Let’s see what it looks like!

I’ll start. Here I am, wearing an Adium hoodie:

Now it’s your turn. What do you (or what does your dog) look like in Adium clothing?

(Comments are on for this post only. Again, please don’t post bug reports in comments here—the correct place is over on the bug tracker. You can use imgur to host your photo(s); just put the image addresses in your comment, without HTML (don’t use <img src=…> or <a href=…>; they’ll get stripped out), and we’ll embed the images in your comment for you as we get to them.)

It’s been 2 weeks since we released version 1.4.  The response has been incredible. Now, hot on its heels, comes 1.4.1 with even more ducky goodness.

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

We’re thrilled by the response so far to Adium 1.4, with over 540,000 downloads in just 4 days.

We’re already hard at work on Adium 1.4.1. Please be sure to file constructive reports on Adium Trac – commenting in an existing ticket, if there is one, rather than clogging the system with duplicate tickets – to help us triage the amount important issues to address. Overall, the response has been resoundingly positive; please work with us as we continue to refine this huge release

As always, comments to this or any other blog post are not the appropriate forum for a bug report or question!