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!
Hi folks! We’ve released a 1.3.4 beta, available at the beta page.
This is a small bugfix release, which includes a newer version of libpurple’s 2.5.5 release, as well as a newer version of pidgin-facebookchat, the plugin which powers our Facebook chat. Pidgin-facebookchat 1.50 includes the fix for the bandwidth drain found in previous versions of the plugin.
Test it out, let us know how it goes! And yes, 1.4 is getting closer and closer; patience. 🙂
A distributed version control system makes 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!
For well over a year now, Twitter has been an often-requested addition to our repertoire of services. As a user of the service I absolutely understand. The current base of Twitter clients often leave something to be desired, behave in a weird way, or just add an additional application you need to keep open.
Fear not! Using Matt Gemmell‘s MGTwitterEngine, a library used to communicate with the Twitter API, I’ve managed to make what I consider to be a very good Twitter client into Adium. Your friends (people you follow) are displayed in a group on the Contact List: adding or removing will follow or unfollow them, and chatting with them will send (or receive) direct messages. Note that you can only send a direct message to someone who follows you, so it might be a one-way conversation.
A group chat named “Timeline (username)” (you can rename it like I have above) will appear alongside your Twitter contacts. When new tweets arrive, this group chat will open; you can close it to help keep your place in the tweets, or leave it open and watch them arrive. Of course, the check interval is customizable (between never checking and checking every hour), and you can force an update through the chat’s context menu. There’s also an option to automatically update tweets when you send one.
When an incoming tweet is a reply to one of yours, the message style you are using will highlight the message for you. I’m going to be modifying all of the message styles included in Adium to support this (it’s been around for group chats since 1.3 was released, but not many have added it). You can also set an Event to fire when a reply comes in: display a growl notification, play a sound, whatever floats your boat!
You can get information on any of your Twitter contacts, and their biographical information (with links to friends, followers, and updates) and their latest 20 statuses will be loaded.
Next to every Tweet is a set of action links. “original” will go to the post which the tweet is replying to, “link” will go to the permanent link for the status, and the “reply” link will set up a reply like below. The “@” character next to the character count indicates that the Tweet you are sending is replying to a specific tweet.
If you come across a tweet online, you can open the “Reply to a Tweet” window, which lets you either enter the username and status ID, or paste the twitter.com URL to fill in the information. This makes replying to tweets other people reference a great deal easier! For example, if I didn’t click the “reply” link for Ryan’s status above, I could paste the Twitter.com URL into the window and see something like this:
My goal has been to integrate the service seamlessly into the Adium experience, and I think I’m meeting or exceeding my own expectations. However, I’m definitely open for suggestions which could go in before this is released. There’s still a few bugs to iron out, a few things to finish up, and a few new ideas which are bound to pop into my head. We also need to beat Twitter into submission about giving us a service identifier.
I’ve got a fun few ideas for ways Adium could save you time and effort, like automatically uploading images you insert into a message (like you would a direct IM on AIM) to Twitpic. This will largely depend on how much time and effort are available before Adum 1.4 is released (hopefully in the next few months we’ll see a beta!) and how many insane stints of programming I can slip in between now and then.
The Adium team is proud to announce the availability of Adium 1.3.3.  This release sports a whole bunch of improvements and bug fixes, including smarter behavior with offline messaging, better group chat reliablity, and Facebook awesomeness (like showing the person’s Facebook info in the Contact Inspector)… as well as a slew of Gadu-Gadu, ICQ, MSN, and MySpace improvements from the libpurple team. Check out the version history for the full list.
We need you. Adium is free and open source, and the surest way to improve it – and join a fun community, improve your knowledge of the language of love (okay, actually just of the Mac and the iPhone), and so on – is to get involved! Click the link to learn how you could help out.
Thanks as always to NetworkRedux for their generous donation of web services and support and to our download host CacheFly. Both these companies have been wonderful to Adium… and would be wonderful to you, too. 🙂
A user named Kyrosan on IRC sent in this video of his cat answering an Adium sound (specifically, the contact-signed-off sound from the TokyoTrainStation set). Behold:
Thanks to Kyrosan for the video link, and to Robby (who is one of the people who help out on our Trac) for suggesting that I make a blog post out of it.
While writing this post, I couldn’t help but think of the story of another cat and Japanese train station.
As of 11:43 today (the 12th), MSN is now working for us in 1.3.2. Looks like the Libpurple team was right—it was a server-side problem, which Microsoft has now cleared up.
Thank you for your patience.
Starting at about 20:00 PST tonight (January 11), Microsoft’s servers have stopped accepting logins from clients that use version 15 of the protocol, including Adium 1.3.2. The Debug Window in debug and beta versions of Adium reveals that their server is failing to find a certificate that it needs when Libpurple attempts to retrieve your MSN Address Book.
In case you’re wondering, this also affects Pidgin, which means it’s definitely not an Adium problem.
There are two ways to connect:
We’re not sure whether this is a temporary server problem or a permanent change that will break P15-using Libpurple-based clients (including Adium 1.3.2) until a future Libpurple release. If it turns out to be the latter, we’ll almost certainly include that Libpurple update in our next 1.3.3 beta.
The question has come up a few times, so it might be helpful to explain. From your Google Talk account, send a message to +1XXXYYYZZZZ@sms.talk.google.com (US-only at the moment), or add it to your contact list. Voila!
This was pointed out in ticket #11488 in our Trac system.
