The Adium team is proud to announce the availability of Adium 1.2. This is a major feature release with a ton of fantastic improvements as well as a a ridiculous number of bug fixes. We’ve discussed many (but not all) of the new features themselves previously on the blog, including the improved Adium menu item and account management features, various and sundry improvements to Jabber support (including SSL certification authentication, server-supplied action support, and discovery services browsing), fixed Bonjour local area network messaging with file transfers, better group chat (conferencing), a completely rewritten Applescript dictionary which should lead to all sorts of powerful new interactions with other programs, and detachable groups. (One ‘advertised’ feature which did not make it into Adium 1.2 was MSN personal messages; development efforts for these are still in progress by the libpurple team. A future version of Adium will have this enhancement once it’s ready.)

That’s not all! Massive improvements have been made to the localization of Adium; if your native language is Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English (including Australian English), Finnish, French, French Canadian, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, or Turkish, you’ll find Adium 1.2 to be your most natural instant messaging experience ever. 188 tickets were closed by Adium 1.2; each ticket represents a feature request or bug, most filed by users. As always, see the version history for all the noteworthy changes.

A lot goes into every Adium release, from testing to coding to support. We’re a friendly and active development and user community, but we always want for more hands, eyes, and minds. That means you! Remember, Adium is free, open source software, coded entirely by volunteers. See Contributing to Adium for how you can submit patches and code, help hunt down bugs, and donate!

We greatly appreciate the donated resources of our excellent site and code host NetworkRedux (who most recently added donated rack space and connectivity for our Mac Mini build and testing machine, smew, to the array of services they provide us) and our download host CacheFly!

Hey folks. A recent discussion on the development list about blogging has sparked me to write about some of the new things in 1.2 that I’ve been working on. You can partly blame Colin for this.

Enjoy!

Status Item

One of the fun features of Adium is the status menu item, often referred to as the “Evil Menu Duck” (or EMD). It’s the little duck that sits in your menu bar and tells you all kind of information about your status. Coming in 1.2 is a bunch of additions and changes to the little guy.

 

The most obvious change is the inclusion of a Contacts list, which lets you quickly message contacts without having to go to the contact list itself. It shows the contact’s status and user icon next to their name.

You can also hold option while clicking on the status item (as shown in the second image) to just get the contacts menu on its own. Very quick, very easy access to your contact list.

As you can see, there have also been several other changes to it. The menu bar now tells you how many unread messages you have (in this case, I have 1, from myself). Open chats also have the user’s icon instead of their status icon, and tab-order is respected in their list.

Account-specific status has been moved to a sub-menu if you have more than 1 account. From the accounts submenu, you can quickly open the accounts list (you’ll see why you’ll want to in a bit).

In cleaning it up, I’ve also removed a few of the items that used to be there. “Bring Adium to Front”, “Show/Hide Contact List” and “Quit Adium” are all gone. I don’t think they were used often enough and were making the menu a lot more cluttered. You can open the contact list quickly by clicking “Contact List…” in the Contacts menu.

Menu Bar Icon Xtras can now specify whether or not the “unread content” icon flashes on and off. This makes catching your attention a lot easier when you get a new message. We’ll be including a more flashy (and colorful) version of the Adiumy menu bar xtra to complement the current one with the release of 1.2.

Accounts List and Reconnecting

The other major project I’ve been working on is making account connection status a lot easier and more obvious. Accounts will no longer give up trying to connect to the server, but will instead attempt to (at an exponential decay) connect indefinitely. Of course, things like invalid passwords, signing on at another location and rate limiting will stop the reconnect attempts.

 

Most accounts have steps for logging in, such as “Connecting”, “Authenticating”, “Sending Password”, etc. Previously we’d drop the information; now it’s displayed inline in the accounts list. Error messages are also shown in the same location. When the network isn’t available, the account will be labeled as “Network Offline”.

You can right-click on any of the accounts to quickly change their options or set their individual status from inside the account list. I’ve also added a new command to the File menu that is “Connect All Accounts”. Early in the 1.0 beta, setting an online status would connect all offline accounts. This behavior was reverted, but an easy way to connect offline accounts was never reintroduced.

In my testing, I’ve had no situations where an account doesn’t somehow manage to get back online when disconnected.

 

Of course these aren’t the only changes that can be found in 1.2. Lots of work has been put into it so far, and the finished product is going to be quite nice. Oh and MSN users, get ready for some fun new features (yes, working personal messages is one of them). 🙂

Congratulations to Zac West, previously the Adium team’s webmaster and a trusted patch writer, on becoming a full Adium Developer! We’re thrilled to have him on the team 🙂

Happy Sunday! Adium 1.1.3 is now available. This bugfix + feature release fixes a number of major and minor problems with previous versions. Notably, crashes in the transcript viewer and events editor are fixed, MSN now works again using the HTTP connect method (needed in many firewalled environments; this was broken by a change to the MSN servers), and Yahoo group chat rooms work again (previously broken by a change to the Yahoo servers).

A couple of the upcoming changes for Adium 1.2 are included in this release, as well: a subsection of the XMPP improvements see the light of day for Adium now rather than later, and the MySpace instant messaging service is now available.

As always, see the Version History for the full changes list.

Adium 1.1.3 is a recommended upgrade for all users of Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

A lot goes into every Adium release, from testing to coding to support. We’re a friendly and active development and user community, but we always want for more hands, eyes, and minds. That means you! Remember, Adium is free, open source software, coded entirely by volunteers. See Contributing to Adium for how you can submit patches and code, help hunt down bugs, and donate! Thanks as always for the continued support of our excellent site and code host NetworkRedux and our download host CacheFly!

Hey folks,

With Adium 1.1, we added better support for both Nudge (msn) and Buzz (yahoo), thanks to Zac. After looking at some comments on digg and other sites, it looks like folks were a little confused as to how to use this, so I made a video about it. I go over how to use /nudge, but if you are on yahoo it should be /buzz

2 things I didn’t cover in the video: You can also send a nudge or buzz by using the Notify toolbar button (which you may have to add to your toolbar) or by selecting “Send Notification” from the Contact menu.

You can check out the video in the Video section!

I think you might be wondering what’s up with the previous post by Evan. I’d attempt to summarize the situation, but Daniel Jalkut‘s done a much better job than I could. I highly encourage you to read his post. As someone who was there at the conference, I have to say I agree with a lot of what Daniel says.

DB has been a friend of the project in the past, and he was a welcome participant at last year’s C4[0], but I’m a bit concerned by his actions at C4 — many attendees, myself included, had a very sour experience at his panel.

Way back in 2004, drunkenbatman published an interview with yours truly. Good reading, I like to think, about the history of Adium and other fun topics. Since then, he’s become a close friend.

I don’t keep a personal blog, but since drunkenbatman has been a longtime supporter of Adium, I don’t think this is a wholly improper forum to say that I support him and firmly believe that he stood only the cause of open, honest discussion at C4, and I’ll stand by him with confidence.

If you know what I’m talking about, you now know my position. Otherwise, I apologize for the interruption and now leave you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Folks,

Currently we are in the process of moving forum hosting from the generous hosting of James Cox to Network Redux.

As some of you may or may not know, we actually had a bunch of projects on the forums, called Cocoaforge. It was a concept that James went along with us on, he came up with some parts of the idea. Overall it’s been a great experiment, with users from one application learning about others, and everyone helping everyone else out.

The move to Network Redux is due to a time constraint issue placed on James. Also, the donated servers he was using are now no longer free to use, so there is a cost issue. Finally, we here at the Adium team would like to experiment with providing more shared services between projects, so this move enables us to look at our options for that.

We do not have an ETA for how long the forum move will take.

I’ve created some more screenshots of my XMPP project which might be of interest to some readers here. They’re available on my website.

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!