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)

Yahoo! has made a change on their server that prevents Adium 1.3.4 and the 1.4 betas from connecting. We have released a new beta, beta 7, which contains the fix.

As we’ve noted before, 1.4 will require Leopard. Those of you who are still hanging on to Tiger are currently stuck, as we do not yet have a fixed version for you. We’ll release a 1.3.5 shortly after Libpurple 2.5.7 comes out, as that version will also contain the fix. (Libpurple, for those of you who don’t know, is the library Adium uses to connect to Yahoo! and most other services.) The Adium 1.4 betas use pre-release versions of Libpurple 2.6.

Adium 1.2.7 is now available. It’s just like Adium 1.2.6 except without the major XMPP problem which snuck into that release.

Unfortunately, a ‘small’ mistake in Adium 1.2.6 causes major problems over XMPP. We have found and corrected the problem. Adium_1.2.7b1 is available with the fix, [24183].

Please note that this is a beta of 1.2.7. We’ll try to have a release of 1.2.7 out once we’ve verified that there are no other new problems in 1.2.6 (relative to 1.2.5) which should be addressed at the same time.

Please don’t chime in with every old problem, pet peeve, or enhancement request in the comments of this post!

Caveat emptor: As a beta version, Adium 1.2.7b1 will be very eager to update you to the latest beta, Adium 1.3b6. That’s probably not what you want if you’re sticking to Adium 1.2.x. If you install Adium 1.2.7b1, and you want to update to Adium 1.2.7 when it is released, you will need to check adiumx.com manually and update manually. Otherwise, you will continue to be notified of Adium 1.3 beta updates until Adium 1.3 is released.

Adium 1.3b6 is plagued by the same problem as Adium 1.2.6 with XMPP; this will be fixed for the Adium 1.3 beta series in Adium 1.3b7.

Those of you who’ve used MSN via Adium on Leopard may have observed Adium taking a very long time to connect, or not connecting at all. A lot of you sent us bug reports about this.

The problem wasn’t a bug in Adium, or even in Libpurple. In Mac OS X 10.5.0, Apple changed the way it looks up hostnames, such as the one for the MSN server. They changed it to use a “SRV” request instead of an “A” request.

Unfortunately, some ISPs’ domain-name servers only knew how to handle “A” requests, and would ignore the “SRV” requests. That’s what was causing the problem: broken domain-name servers.

In Mac OS X 10.5.3, Apple changed its lookup method back to the earlier behavior. So, for those of you who had this problem, MSN should now connect again, without workarounds such as using OpenDNS.

I’ve just finished writing a full account of yesterday’s bugfix scramble and posted it on my own blog. Those of you who are curious about how we operate may find it interesting reading. Enjoy. ☺

We’ve just released versions 1.0.6 (for Mac OS X 10.3.9) and 1.1.1 (for Mac OS X 10.4 and later) of Adium. These contain the Sparkle Plus fix that I mentioned previously, so you should now be able to run the check for updates with confidence. Thanks go to all the users who helped me track down the problem over this afternoon.

I just took 1.1 and the minimumSystemVersion elements out of our update feeds. This means that you’ll no longer be able to Sparkle-update to 1.1, but you also won’t crash on your update check.

Coming later tonight: 1.0.6 (for Panther users) and 1.1.1 (for Tiger users), at the same time.

What caused the crash?

First, a moment of context: The 1.1 series requires Tiger. We dropped Panther to make it easier for ourselves and our GSoC students to work on Adium; each OS upgrade brings with it new tools for us to use that we can’t use if we continue to support previous versions. So at some point, we drop one of the old OS versions so we can use new yum that the latest one has introduced.

So 1.1 won’t run on Panther. This is a problem for our Panther users; the latest version they can run is 1.0.5 (1.0.6, soon), but the update feed was promising 1.1. So Evan added some code to the update feeds to state that 1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later; our updater is smart enough to not bother you about an update if it can’t run it, but only if the feed tells it the version that the update requires.

So far, so good. But Evan added the information as an attribute, and it’s supposed to be an element. (Don’t worry about the difference.) The result of this was that our Sparkle updater did not notice the minimum system version, because it was in the wrong place.

So, early this morning, I fixed the appcast, moving the minimum system version to an element, as it’s supposed to be.

That’s when it broke.

It turns out that our Sparkle Plus updater had a bug that caused it to crash when there’s a minimumSystemVersion element. When it was an attribute, it didn’t even see it (it doesn’t look there for that), so there was no crash. When it wasn’t in the appcast at all, there was no crash. But once it was put in properly, it revealed the crash.

This had been fixed in Sparkle, but somehow, the fix never made it to Sparkle Plus.

What now?

I’ve fixed the bug for 1.0.6 and 1.1.1. 1.0.6 is for Panther users, and 1.1.1 is for Tiger users.

We’re also changing the feed URL with these versions, in order to not break older versions of Adium (Zac points out that 12.4% of you are still using 1.0.4!).

First, I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to GEICO.

Second, I believe I’ve found the problem that makes the updater crash. If I’m right, it was a pretty simple should’ve-retained-that bug in Sparkle. If the fix works, we’ll have a 1.1.1 out sometime soon—if all goes well, within the hour.

Sorry about all this, people. But those of you who came to the IRC channel to help us find the problem, thank you very much.