ICQ Service Issues (9/10)

ICQ accounts are not correctly retrieving their server-side contacts lists. This seems to be a server-side issue and not specific to Adium. There is no known workaround at this time, so let’s wait and see if the servers fix themselves :-).

A few weeks ago Evan and I had a long discussion about where we wanted to take Adium over the next few months. Ultimately the discussion turned to our release schedule…

Adium, beyond 0.63:

Adium has moved to the stage in its life where new features are either massive undertakings or target a small number of users. A one week release schedule does not leave enough time for massive additions (such as the new contact list, meta contacts, a file transfer interface, etc), and minor features do little to warrant a new release and little towards encouraging users happy with their current version to upgrade.

So the obvious solution was to extend the releases to a longer schedule. We agreed upon releasing every other week instead, with the idea that this would give us more time to work on each release of Adium and result in bigger, more encouraging to upgrade changelogs.

But then we got to thinking… At this point in Adium’s life, what are the advantages of a weekly release schedule? One clear advantage is that users receive more frequent updates. However, we’ve found that recently a lot of users aren’t downloading every new release of Adium. When asked, they tell us that are happy with the release they have and see nothing in a new version worth the hassle of a download. To understand why this happens we need to see Adium updates from a typical user’s perspective.

For most users, upgrading software brings both excitement and fear; Excitement over what has been added to the newest release and fear over what will be discovered as unintentionally broken. If excitement does not outweigh fear a user will be less likely to upgrade.

What Adium needs is more excitement and less fear. We want every version of Adium to be exciting and contain at least one change or addition that makes the program more enjoyable to use for every user. We’d like Adium to be as bug free as possible and would love for each release to correct more bugs that it introduces. We desire Adium releases that are more fun for our users and less of a weekly routine. The best way to achieve all of this would be switching to a more traditional release schedule.

While a weekly release schedule is based on time, a traditional schedule is one based on goals. The Adium team would create several goals for each release (0.7, 0.8, 0.9) and a release would occur once those goals had been completed. This is great because goal-based releases would be less frequent, leaving more time for testing and lowering fear. Goal-based releases would also be larger, bringing more additions and enhancements and raising excitement! As an added bonus, a traditional release schedule would make it much easier to release minor updates for bugs, security, and connectivity issues.

What does this mean to you as a user? Simply a better, more exciting Adium.

See you all in 0.70 🙂

Misc Notes:

– Users looking to live on the edge with daily ‘releases’ are encouraged to build Adium from source. We’ve switched from CVS to SVN and our source no longer has a 5 hour delay, which means that you can experience changes instantly as they are made and announced in #adium.

– Moving away from weekly releases makes working on Adium a lot more relaxing and provides us with a chance to experience a traditional release cycle. Most of the developers are here for fun and experience, and this change should provide us with more of both.

We are starting to look for translators for Adium. If you know a language other than English, and would like to help out in a non-programming way. Currently Adium only uses American English.

Some parts of Adium are not ready to be translated, so this will be a longer process. But if you would like to help, please email tick at adiumx dot com

Thanks

Update
I have already gotten a ton of responses regarding this. I will get to them all.

School is starting up very soon for most of us. We appreciate your patience (and enthusiasm :-D) as we work towards 0.64.

Looks like anonymous CVS is back up.

Well, there’s still no 0.64. Technically, Adam never said when we’d be starting the biweekly release schedule 😉

I can guarantee that 0.64 will be the best version of Adium yet, though! Thanks for being so patient, everyone, we’re working hard to get this new version in your hands as soon as possible.

Also, some of you may have noticed that anonymous CVS access is down. Sourceforge is working on resolving this issue as quickly as possible.

We’re in the middle of some huge changes to the Adium source, there will not be a release today. But 0.64, when it comes, is going to be a very exciting update.

The changes we’ve been working on involve the addition of contact merging (also known as meta-contacts) and a major rewrite of the Adium contact list. More information (including some early screenshots) on the contact list rewrite and upcoming changes can be found on the Adium forum.

We are currently on a bi-weekly release schedule, aiming to release a new update every other friday. We’re definitely looking forward to getting these new changes into your hands, and will do so as soon as possible 🙂

The Adium forums are now divided into 3 categories. We hope that this makes it easier to use the forums for discussion, requests, and bug reporting. The current categories are:

General & Requests – Adium talk, feature requests, General discussion

Bugs – Bug reporting and discussing

Xtras – Xtras requests, showing off, creation help, and discussion

We will be moving Xtras and Bugs posts from the General forum as they are posted into. Thanks for your patience during the transition 🙂

Adium 0.63 is now available!

0.63 brings support for the sametime protocol, improvements to tab grouping and arranging, improved behavior when hidden, better support for typing notifications, improved sound code, and much more.

Check the version history for a complete list of what’s new 🙂

Saved window positions and contact list auto-resizing preferences will be reset when you upgrade to 0.63. Auto-resizing preferences are in Advanced -> Contact List -> Auto-resizing.

Yeah, Friday came and went. We’ve made some huge under-the-hood improvements which, as with any far-reaching set of changes, brought with them a cute lil’ collection of bugs.

Once we get those ironed out, Adium X 0.63 will be coming your way.

I’m out for two weeks, first for vacation and then for work. Later 🙂