Adium

Archive for 2011

Adium 1.4.4

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Adium 1.4.4 is now available. For the full list of changes see the release notes.

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.

Adium 1.4.3

Sunday, September 4th, 2011

Adium 1.4.3 is now available. For the full list of changes and all the gory details see the release notes.

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!

Introduction: Adrian Godoroja

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Hi, I’m Adrian, a 2007 Computer Science graduate from Europe, who currently runs a small software development company (iOS/Mac OS apps and games).

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!

Introduction: Patrick Steinhardt

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

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

Monday, June 13th, 2011

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)

Introduction: Matthew

Monday, February 28th, 2011

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.

Introduction: Frank Dowsett

Saturday, February 19th, 2011

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.

Introduction: Thijs Alkemade

Friday, February 18th, 2011

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. 🙂

New Faces

Friday, February 18th, 2011

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.