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 🙂

There was a ticket #7483 that was asking for iCal integration with Adium. The AppleScript support for Adium has advanced to the point of being able to do this. The script is available here. Simply attach it to iCal events, and Adium’s status will change when the event is fired. Very handy.

Mentor Peter Hosey adds: This will only work when Matt’s Summer of Code work arrives in a release Adium. That will be 1.2, at the earliest.

A rather unusual result of this year’s Summer of Code is a new XMPP extension I created:

I am pleased to tell everyone that file transfer receiving now works with Bonjour messaging!

While we were at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, Peter, Colin, and I all went down to the Googleplex and recorded a podcast with the lovely and talented Leslie Hawthorn of Google Summer of Code fame. It got rather silly, but I think that’s just a good reflection of the project.

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.