The Adium 1.1.2 beta is now available. Get it while it’s hot!

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.

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.

For many people, Adium 1.1 is crashing on launch (specifically, at the moment where it automatically updates). We’ve had a few reports of this happening to 1.0.5 people as well, but almost all the reports now are from people who are fresh off of 1.0.5, on their first launch of 1.1.

We have a ticket on this: it’s #7542. This bug is already confirmed. We do not need more tickets nor any statements that you have the bug too. What we do need is help tracking down the bug.

We know that the problem is with our automatic updater, but we need help from people who are able to reproduce this issue in order to track it down precisely.

Right now, as I write this, I’m compiling a debug version of Adium that we’ll distribute to a few people on the IRC channel. If you have programmer skills and a working installation of Xcode 2.4.x, we invite you to drop in and help us step up to the bug. We have no reason to believe that this version is fixed; this is a debugging version. If you don’t have programmer skills, using the debug version will not help anything—we certainly hope that it still has the bug, so that we can find the bug and fix it.

So if you fit the above criteria, please come by and help us out. We would appreciate it.

The last release of Adium was about a month ago, so you might think that Adium 1.1 has been in development just that long. You might also think that ice cream is better without caramel. You’d be wrong on both counts. Adium 1.1 development started over a year ago, and the ducky fruits of that labor are now yours to enjoy 😀

Adium 1.1, now available, includes one of the student projects from the Google Summer of Code 2006. That project — new, tastier tabs, using PSMTabBarControl — provides a number of benefits:

• You can arrange your tabs on any side of the message view, not just the bottom. Tabs are arranged vertically when you put them on the left or right edge of the window and horizontally when you put them on the top or bottom.
• Tabs handle overflow better by presenting a chevron (») menu, just like toolbars do.
• Tabs are now spring-loaded, so that if you drag something to a tab that isn’t active, it will activate, so that you can position the thing you’re dragging precisely within the inputline.
• You can have each tab display the number of unread messages, if any.
• More! Play around and find out.

Adium 1.1 brings other fresh yum besides the new tabs:

• Prettier
• Faster
• Changes in the contact list, such as people coming online and going offline, animate smoothly.
• The contact list’s ability to hide like the Dock at the edge of the screen has been improved.
• A new type of AdiumXtra, the menu bar icon xtra, has been created to let you customize the appearance of Adiumy in your menu bar; you can download AdiumMenuBarIcons packs from AdiumXtras.com.
• Buzz on Yahoo! and nudge on MSN are now fully supported.
• AIM DirectConnect should be more reliable and less memory intensive; it is now automatically initiated as needed.
• You can now import accounts and chat transcripts from iChat.
• Adium now warns you if you run Adium from the disk image. This will especially benefit new Mac users who aren’t accustomed to working with disk images.
• Right-to-left text is handled property on MSN.

You can read the full, extensive, exhaustive, and complete list of changes on our version history page.

Be sure to see Contributing to Adium for how you can submit patches and code, help hunt down bugs, and otherwise contribute to development. If you don’t code and want to support the project, please consider donating!

Thanks as always for the continued support of our excellent site and code host NetworkRedux and our download host CacheFly!