Adium

Archive for August, 2006

Temporary trac access

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

So if you need access to trac, you can log in with:

username: adium
password: adium

We will not be turning anonymous access back on, but do have a plan to allow users to register for accounts at some point. It’ll probably be 3-4 weeks before we get a chance to take a good look at it though.

In the meantime, this and the forums are both places to report issues. If you post to the forums, please keep beta issues in the beta forums.

Trac anonymous write access temporarily disabled

Monday, August 28th, 2006

We’ve just had a major flood of spammers which are somehow getting around the spam filters we had in place on Trac. Until we can solve the problem, anonymous bug / feature request submission will be disabled. We hope to have a fix in place within the week.

How the support infrastructure works

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

This post is about how the support infrastructure works. We have in place a bunch of different ways to contact us for support:

– The forums
– Trac ticket system
– Email
– Blog comments

But there are a bunch of questions people have. A lot of people ask:

Why haven’t the Adium devs fixed the squirrels!

Well, not really squirrels, so replace the word “squirrels” with a problem.

Most of the time when we don’t see an issue, we don’t fix it. So that’s why getting issues to us in a way that we can try to reproduce them is great. Screenshots, detailed steps, etc.

Does everyone remember “the aim problem from last week”? Good, we’re going to use it as an example from here on out.

So whenever you have a problem, say, “the aim problem from last week”, we absolutely need you to do a few things:

1) Figure out if it’s an issue that needs discussion, or if it’s one that needs to just be fixed.

Issues that need discussion are probably best to be posted on the forums.

Issues that just need a fix are probably best to be posted to trac.

If you don’t know, post to the forums.

(the rest assumes you are going to trac)
2) Do a search!

We get at least 15 duplicate tickets per day on all sorts of issues. Well, at least it feels that way. It’s understandable if you can’t find a ticket, but we have over 5000 tickets so more than likely your issue is in there somewhere.

3) Read the ticket. This includes comments.

Guys/Gals, we don’t need 50 people telling us that their aim connection is no longer working, with the same exact symptoms. If you have new info, we need that, but otherwise just continue watching the ticket.

4) Follow the Reporting Bugs page.

Do a search, you’ll find it.

Anyhow, hope this helps.

Oh ya, one more thing:

Comments in the blog are less likely to be worked if the issue is in trac/on the forums. But comments are indeed welcome. 🙂

Adium X 1.0b9

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

We don’t ordinarily do blog posts about betas, but I thought I’d follow up to the previous post by pointing out that 1.0b9 is now up. Besides the AIM thing, there are two other things on the changelog worth mentioning:

  • MSN custom emoticons work again, though not without a few rough edges still (#3941).
  • The long-awaited QQ service (#383). Hooray for the Google Summer of Code!

A lot of our Chinese users have been waiting for QQ support for a long time. As for custom emoticons, they’re not working perfectly yet (when we receive one, the message view doesn’t auto-scroll the way that it should), but they are working. I’ll throw out an informal prediction that it will be completely fixed by b10.

Happy beta-testing, and please report those bugs!

Adium beta AIM problems resolved

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

For those keeping score at home, the problem with AIM in Adium 1.0 beta stemmed from overexcitedness on the beta’s part. AIM imposes a “rate limit” which prevents clients from sending too much data too quickly. We were effectively ignoring that rate limit during the sign on process.

That was well and good (sic), except that an AIM server upgrade, unrelated to Adium or any other third party client, occurred on Thursday of this past week. That upgrade included stricter rate limiting requirements, which pushed Adium 1.0 beta over the edge. After the upgrade, users whose buddy lists required significant information requests during sign on — large number of buddies, many away buddies with away messages, many buddies with buddy icons — were summarily kicked during sign on.

We’ve fixed the problem for 1.0b9, which will be available in the next 24 hours. 🙂

Aim issues in the beta

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

There are some Aim issues that are happening which fall under the following criteria:

1) Your account needs to have a significant amount of buddies listed on it.

2) You are using the Beta.

If you have both then you’ll see that your aim account is signing off and on at random times until you get kicked off of the Aim servers.

We are quite aware of the issue, and are working on a resolution. In the mean time, .89.1 works, along with iChat and other Aim clients.

Remember folks, this is a beta.

We’re seeing more reports than we need on this issue right now. If you have information on how to fix this we could use that, otherwise we don’t need anymore comments that this is happening to you as well.

We’ve had this problem reported in this locations:

http://forums.cocoaforge.com/viewtopic.php?t=8934
http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/5193
http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/4457
http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/5182
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/08/17/aol-breaks-adium-betas/
http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/4290

In other words, a lot of places. Please do not open any new tickets, and until we close them all as resolved and release a new beta please do not reopen the tickets if we close them.

Thanks.

Merging to a branch

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Augie asked me to do the merge of our SVN trunk into the Smack+Jingle branch (shared by his student and Evan’s student), and I started it last night.

Here’s the timeline.

  • 23:00: Start of merge. Duration: Almost six hours.

  • 04:56: Start of resolving conflicts (sometimes svn reaches an impasse in how to reconcile the older version of a file with the newer; the result is a conflict).

    Most of these were localization-related binary files (so no diff, just the old version and the new version), so that went quickly — all I had to do was select the new version and clobber the old.

    Duration: Half an hour.

  • 05:24: Start of commit.

    • 05:24: Sending, Adding, Replacing, Deleting phase. Duration: 1 hour 19 minutes.

    • 06:43: Transmitting. Duration: 1 hour 13 minutes.

    Total duration of commit: 1 hour 28 minutes.

And so it was done at 07:57 — all told, just about nine hours. You’re welcome, Andreas and Alvaro. ☺

One thing I found out when I did the merge on my own student’s branch (Accessibility) is that svn 1.4 is much better at it (i.e. less likely to produce a conflict) than 1.3.x. This is one reason why Augie asked me to do the Smack+Jingle branch as well; he didn’t/doesn’t have 1.4, and I do (1.4rc2), and he didn’t have time to build it, so it would be faster for me to do the merge. I’m glad I could help out.

(Note: svn 1.4 uses a new working copy format, so I would not recommend upgrading to it completely until it is finally released. I installed it as svn-1.4, and kept 1.3.2 installed, so that I can still use 1.3.2 on my other svn checkouts until the 1.4 release.)

Gizmo in Adium?!!?

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

OK, so it’s not what you’re thinking. ☺

Colin and I were playing with Gizmo 2.0 last night. Before we started, I wanted to try out its IM feature, so I clicked the “IM” button. Up came the prompt:

Account name or Jabber/XMPP ID:

“Hmmm”, I said. I entered my regular Jabber ID and IM’d myself. Up popped a tab in Adium, from mygizmousername@chat.gizmoproject.com.

Now thoroughly in an experimental mood, I added a Jabber account to Adium, with the JID set to mygizmousername@chat.gizmoproject.com and the connect server set to chat.gizmoproject.com.

Sure enough, it works flawlessly. Contact list changes in Adium carry over to Gizmo and vice versa. The only Gizmo feature missing in Adium is voice chat. 😉

So, if you don’t like that Gizmo doesn’t support Adium message view styles (Skype does), just use Adium. ☺

Interview at OSNews

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

In case you folks are interested, I was interviewed by OSNews regarding Adium and Growl.

Here ya go:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15442

How fast can you build Adium? Ask Apple

Monday, August 7th, 2006

In case you’ve been under a rock for the past nine hours, the Mac Pro was among the things announced today at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

And on the Mac Pro site, they have a Performance page showing benchmark comparisons of the Mac Pro to the quad G5 before it. Under “Science and Technical Computing”, there are six benchmarks. One of these is “Xcode: Build project”.

The project they built for this test was Adium X 0.89. ☺

I, for one, think this is very cool. Thanks, Apple. ☺ And thanks also to Arvid Norberg to tipping us off to this.