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.