There are three types of bugs a user can run up against in Adium:

– Logic flaws (Mistakes in our logic, where we’ve told Adium to behave incorrectly)

– Exceptions (Small mistakes that Adium catches while running)

– Unexpected quits (Mistakes or errors that Adium is unable to recover from)

Currently, when the user encounters an exception, Adium aborts the particular task it was on and attempts to keep going. While this may sound like a good thing, skipping code that was intended to run can cause some very strange behavior later. What’s worse is that the user often doesn’t realize they’ve encountered an error. (This is what we’re looking for when we tell you to ‘check console.app’).

Unexpected quits let the user know something went wrong, and even generate a log to let us know more information about the crash. Unfortunately, fetching these logs and emailing them to us is a pain. Making things more complicated is Apple’s ‘crash submit’ dialog which prompts the user to send Apple a crash report. We don’t get reports sent to Apple, and this may trick users into thinking they’ve reported a crash to us.

We are working on code to simplify the process of sending us Adium’s crash logs. We are also working on code to generate and send helpful logs when there is an exception.

This is really exciting for us, because it will result in much more crash/exception reports and ultimately lead to a much stabler Adium. More details will emerge as we have them. 🙂

I’ve removed the avatars from the binary – We weren’t using them and they’re kinda big 🙂

Tomorrow’s binary should be a smaller download.

AdamIser:”This change touches a lot of files.”

Hm. ~Well they say the sky’s the limit, and to me that’s really true, but my friend you have seen nothing, just wait ’til I get through, because I’m bad, I’m bad, come on…~

Everybody, keep an eye out for new crashes and bugs in today’s binary. I touched a lot of files yesterday, and odds are that I made a mistake or two somewhere 🙂

[Known Bug(s) : Already fixed]

– Issues with contact alerts (Empty action menus, assertions)

The LaTeX plugin is working again, thanks to max_cohen (Stephen Poprocki). To use it, you need a working pdflatex binary and Equation Service. You can get both from http://www.rna.nl/tex.html.

If you don’t know what it does, it typesets mathematics beautifully, creating integral signs and such.

Adium is aqua again.

Give it a week or so and then let us know what you think 🙂

I’ll be adding up the results of the protocols thread sometime this weekend. After that I won’t be adding anymore to the stats, so vote while you can.

Oh, and watch out for the throbbing EvilMenuBarDuck. This is all.

I just committed a tutorial file on how to make Adium’s plugins localizable-friendly, so we developers should begin following it . The file is named “Tutorial for devs”, and it is located in the “localizing” folder inside “Documentation” folder of the source code main folder.

Have fun!

Oh ya, thanks to Laura for making TickDuck (tm), and all the other ducks. You can check out the other ducks at her site

I am re-evaluating Adium 2.0’s brushed metal interface. Everyone’s feedback and votes are much appreciated. (Bring your friends!!) 🙂

http://www.funmac.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3909