Adium 1.2, our next major goal, is going to be a crazy awesome release. In the last two days we’ve finished the initial merges of our Google Summer of Code 2007students’ efforts; it’ll be some time and effort before the development trunk of Adium is stable and close to a release with all these incoming changes, but it’ll be well worth it. The Summer of Code was a huge success:

• Andy Monitzer made many improvements to libpurple’s XMPP/Jabber support, benefiting not only Adium, but also Pidgin and Finch.

• Erich Kreutzer modernized, fixed, and expanded Adium’s Bonjour support, implementing file transfer in the process.

• Erik Beerepoot worked on multi-user conferencing in Adium, making good strides toward a more full-featured, shiny group chat experience.

• Matt Handley greatly expanded Adium’s AppleScript support; it will now be possible to control Adium easily via AppleScript, paving the way to even more great user content and control customizability.

• Andre Cohen implemented snapping / detachable groups which let you detach groups from the contact list into free-floating windows

In addition, Adium 1.2 will utilize libpurple 2.2.0, which will bring a number of improvements, most notably the results of a Google Summer of Code project for Pidgin by Jeff Connelly which has added MySpaceIM support.

Join us in improving Adium! Read Contributing To Adium to learn how you can help 🙂

Time for an update on Group Chats!

Over the last week I worked on implementing room commands. Although adium supported room commands previously, I have written a graphical interface to use these commands. For all services, most of the commands should be working (like changing your handle, joining a different room), but some are not supported at the moment due to (yet more) limitations of Adium. As of this moment this includes several IRC commands, and the configure commands on Jabber.

Although IRC is not the main focus right now, I will be adding support for all IRC commands to adium (if they are supported by libpurple). This is one among several planned changes to the currently existing IRC Plugin, such as better user management, topic support (in collaboration with David Smith), and visual user differentiation.

In addition, I have fixed several issues with the new userlist, and implemented a few other neat things:

• It is now impossible to hide the userlist by resizing.

• You can now hide the userlist by double clicking the resizing thumb.

• Drag & Drop should now support metacontacts.

I am continuing to work on the roomlist browser, in collaboration with Andreas Monitzer, who wrote the XMPP discovery browser. Currently, we are discussing the details of the userinterface & how to best represent all services.
In addition, progress is being made on chat bookmarking, which I will hopefully get done in the next week or so.

That’s all folks!

Hi,

My name is Erik Beerepoot, i’m another SoC student here at Adium.

Although a bit on the late side perhaps, here’s an update on group chat improvements. As you can read on Google’s SoC page, I proposed to do several improvements on the current implementation of group chat. As coding has been going on for a little over a month now, some of this features have been implemented, and are waiting on dev feedback.

So far, I’ve updated the group chat interface, I’ve changed to old userlist and added a so-called widget bar. A planned feature for this bar is room commands; but for now, it just looks pretty.

I’ve also added drag & drop support to group chats. It is now possible to drag a contact from the contact list to a group chat, and the contact will join the group chat. I’m planning on adding sorting capabilities to the userlist (just like in the contact list), and also making this drag possible for turning a single user chat into a group chat.

Right now, I’m working on adding room/server bookmarking to adium. It is currently being discussed what exactly the proper graphical representation will be.

This is all for now, but i’ll have updates to follow soon!

These are the student branches for GSoC 2007:

• AppleScript support improvements: Trac browser; Subversion
• Bonjour improvements: Trac browser; Subversion
• IAX support: Trac browser; Subversion
• XMPP (Jabber) support improvements: Trac browser; Subversion
• Multi-user chat improvements: Trac browser; Subversion
• Snapping groups: Trac browser; Subversion

I created these branches in r19787 from trunk@19786.

Many users are having problems with group chat in Adium 1.0.3.

We’ve fixed the problem for 1.0.4, which will hopefully be out in the near future. In the meantime, there is a workaround: Go to Adium->Preferences->Advanced->Message History and uncheck “Show up to 5 lines of history in new windows.” This will completely disable the display of recent messages in message windows, but group chat should be functional again.

If you don’t use group chats, or you’re not experiencing any problems, this doesn’t apply to you 🙂

When Adium 1.0.4 comes out and you upgrade, you’ll probably want to turn the feature back on.

As discussed previously, Adium is participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code.

Google gave us six slots, just like last year. We’ve made our choices; here they are:

Adding Voice Support to Adium by Implementing a Basic A/V Backend and IAX

Student: Justin Berka
Mentor: Alan Humpherys
More information on IAX.

Improving group chat

Student: Erik Beerepoot
Mentor: David Smith

Unit testing

Student: Patrick Gibson
Mentor: Brian Ganninger

Fix & expand AppleScript support

Student: Matt Handley
Mentor: Peter Hosey

Improving Adium’s XMPP (Jabber) Support

Student: Andreas Monitzer
Mentor: Augie Fackler
Features Andreas wants to implement: Gateway support, PEP, user tune, user avatar, user nickname, OTR-over-Jabber improvements, , discovery browsing, ad-hoc commands, and possibly invisibility.

Improved Bonjour Support

Student: Erich Kreutzer
Mentor: Andrew Wellington

On Jabber: Yes, we had a similar project last year, but that was using Smack (a separate Jabber library), which we had to drop because of the Java-Cocoa bridge going away. Andreas is back to do it again in libpurple.

Also, we’re not going to have a separate student blog this year. Students’ blog posts will be here, on the main blog.