On :
What’s left? Microsoft Messenger, but most Mac users eschew it in favor of iChat, which supports both AOL’s instant messenger and GoogleTalk, or AdiumX, which supports more or less every instant-messaging scheme under the sun, including Microsoft’s. …
OK, it’s in passing, but it’s still cool. ☺
Thanks to Dan Weeks for the heads-up!
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!
From time to time, a user emails our feedback address reporting that he tried to send a message and got this error:
Could not send; a connection error occurred.
And I never had an answer for those users, because it’s quite an empty error message (“a connection error”? What kind of connection error?) and I never heard anything from the other developers about it. So I always wondered what caused that error message.
Now I’ve found out.
A user on the IRC channel mentioned that he had received that error message. Specifically, he started out asking whether there was a way to “fix sending of URLs through MSN”. I asked for more info, and he revealed that he got the same error message when attempting to send a URL that had a .info domain. I tried a couple such URLs myself, with David‘s help, and confirmed his report—even http://growl.info/ doesn’t work.
The reason MSN gives for this censorship is that it’s to protect users from exploits that use certain URLs. The problem with this reason is that any URL could be an exploit URL; filtering by keyword just isn’t enough, because the attackers can always invent new filenames. The correct solution is simply to fix the exploits.
There’s nothing we can do about this because it’s done on the server. This also means that all clients are affected, not just Adium.
We now have a page on our wiki titled MSN Censorship which contains a (probably incomplete) list of strings that are known to get a message blocked. If you include one of these strings in your message, the message will not arrive and you’ll get the “connection error occurred” error message in your chat window.
If you’d like to not have these problems anymore, we suggest switching to Google Talk or Jabber. If you’re using Gmail/Google Mail, you already have a GTalk account; you need only set it up in Adium and get all your friends to switch. (And yes, as a couple of comments point out, you also have the option of using OTR encryption—but that only works if the contact you’re talking to is also capable of OTR. If they’re running Adium or Pidgin, then they are, but not if they’re using some other client, such as the official MSN client.)
(Sources include and . Joost de Valk is the user I mentioned above. If you use Digg, please .)
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:
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!
Adium 1.1 beta is now available for your testing. This a major Adium release — see the beta page for the list of changes.
Got something to say about the 1.1 beta? Please use Trac after reading ReportingBugs. Enjoy!
Sooo, I implemented the two tickets noted as missing in my last blog entry. Since all that’s left now is waiting on other SoC students, I had to move to something else. My branch was merged into trunk (the main development tree for svn-impaired), which should help adaption and testing.
If anybody reading this is using XMPP frequently, likes living on the edge and writing bug reports, please check out the latest development version of Adium, compile it and use it for a while! If you encounter any bugs or have suggestions, take a look at ReportingBugs. Any input in valuable! If your ticket concerns XMPP, please assign it to “am” (myself), so I get a notification for it.
EDIT: We get a discount on our per-ticket-fees on trac, so please open one separate ticket per request! We can afford that. Thank you for the valuable input I’ve received so far!
