We’re excited to announce that Adium will be a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code. Summer of Code is a program that offers students an amazing opportunity to become involved in open source programming, including a very generous stipend for their summer work. Please see Adium: Summer Of Code for information on the competitive application process and some suggestions of possible project ideas. We’re eagerly anticipating reading student applications once the application process opens on May 1.

Adium X 0.89.1 is now available. While 0.89 was intended to be the last release of the 0.8x release cycle, a recent increase in preventable ICQ Authorization spam has prompted this bugfix release. ICQ “web aware” mode has now been turned off; it was responsible for a significant portion of the authorization request spam many ICQ users were receiving.

Adium X 0.89.1 also updates the Sametime library code (libmeanwhile), fixes a common problem with Applescripting account status, and fixes a problem with the Dutch localization.

Finally, with this release we welcome Turkish speakers to the international Adium community with a Turkish localization. 🙂

Today, Colin and I (he’s co-writing this post—yay SEE!) are going to talk about joscar, a new and major feature of the upcoming 1.0 release.

Joscar is a library written in Java for interfacing with services that use the OSCAR protocol. There are three of these: AIM, ICQ, and .Mac. Other services use different protocols that are not OSCAR; for this reason, we’ll still be using libgaim for these services.

Joscar was written by Keith Lea (username “leak” on Trac), originally as part of the Joust client. He has helped Evan and Augie tremendously with getting it working in Adium.

With joscar, file transfer and Direct IM actually work. Finally, an end to the inability to send and receive files (at least on AIM-esque services). And joscar has a cleaner codebase, so Adium developers can read and modify it more easily. It’s faster, too; faster, even, than libgaim.

Libgaim is not going away, however. As mentioned above, we still need it for other protocols. So 1.0 will still have libgaim, for all the non-OSCAR services. (UPDATE 2006-10-08: Also, joscar’s ICQ support is not very shiny yet, so we’re still using libgaim for ICQ in the meantime. —Peter)

If you have any further questions about joscar, feel free to ask them in the comments, on the forums, or on the IRC channel.

More a ‘hotfix’ than a release, Adium X 0.89.1 beta 1 is now available. It should be a very short beta cycle.

UPDATE: April fool. 😉

We’re pleased to announce, jointly with the ChatKit project and Apple, that Adium (powered by ChatKit) will replace iChat in Leopard.

A future version of Adium, with ChatKit installed, is now running and working in prerelease builds of Mac OS X 10.5. These builds are currently only available to the Adium and ChatKit development teams. Here are some screenshots:

• 
  (courtesy of ChatKit developer Ofri Wolfus)
• 
  (courtesy of Growl project lead and Adium project manager Christopher Forsythe)

That’s right — iChat’s video support has been merged into ChatKit, and Adium can thereby use it. It’s the best of all three worlds!

Other features of the merged Adium-ChatKit-iChat experience:

• Buzz support, integrates with your iPod (now you can be BUZZed on the go!)
• External Buzz: Adium can knock on your friends’ doors to let them know they have messages waiting (requires external hardware, not included)
• Security feature: contact list moves away from your mouse cursor, making it impossible for unauthorized users to double-click on your contacts
• Pink Adiumy
• Boredom meter measures time since last message; can be configured to ring when the conversation is getting too boring
• Intel Core Duo
• Smart contact list groups with iTunes integration
• Wireless integration with iPod’s games: Play games like Brick and Music Quiz over IM
• .Mac synchronization
• Live graphics
• Close widgets have been freshly polished
• Click wheel
• Built-in disc-burning support — IM on the go!
• Support for IM over RFC 1149 transports (with the Duck-Pigeon Adapter)
• Even more tasty sandwiches

Some features are still in development, and will come in a future (post-Leopard) release:

• Electroshock buzz (requires external power supply and plug-in)
• Popcorn
• IM over Blu-Ray (requires that both you and your contact be downhill from each other)
• Interplanetary IM

The adium-joscar branch has been merged to trunk. What this means is that the branch is now effectively bunk and if you have been using the branch, you need to switch to trunk now. I’ll delete the joscar branch when I’m confident everything is going to be stable on trunk.

I’ve tested joscar on an Intel iMac thanks to the IT department at school, where they gave me free run of one for about 5 minutes to test this, and I’ve done some work testing it on stock Java installs, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t run everywhere trunk did before the merge.

Enjoy!

The list below is no longer accurate. Check the trac roadmap for the up to date version if you’re really curious

As many of you know, the next version of Adium will be version 1.0. It’s the biggest release so far, and we’re really excited about it. However, it’s not done yet. There have been some questions about when it’ll be out, why it’s not out already, etc… so I’ve written a bit about what’s left to do. Described below are the remaining “tickets” in our bug/request tracking system that have the 1.0 milestone. Most of them will be fixed before we release a beta (probably in a few months), some will probably be moved to another milestone, and some new ones will be added.

Note: this is NOT a list of what is new in 1.0. This is a list of what’s (currently) left to do before 1.0b1.

• Joscar (assorted tickets)

  Joscar is the completely new AIM code we’ll be using. It replaces libgaim (for AIM/ICQ/.Mac only), and it is going to be one of the biggest changes in 1.0; Working file transfer and direct connect, as well as other improvements. A slim majority of the remaining tickets for 1.0 are related to finishing this up and getting it merged into the main Adium code. The developer of Joscar, Keith Lea, has been absolutely wonderful in working with us to resolve issues and integrate it into Adium, and we’re very pleased with the progress so far.

• Privacy improvements (ticket 19)

  Pretty big changes here; the ability to only allow messages from people on your list, easier editing of who’s blocked and who isn’t, and some other stuff. A lot of it is done already, but some more work will take place once Joscar is done.

• Logging (ticket 38, XMLLogFormat)

  The logging system (Log Viewer, Message History, and Logging plugin) is being completely replaced for 1.0. This is the most unfinished part at the moment. It’s unclear how much will get done, or how long it will take. The end result should support Spotlight, be easier to use, and be faster.

• Review default Xtras (ticket 3134)

  We’re still deciding what Xtras we will include with 1.0. There’s hundreds of great candidates, and more are being made all the time. We’ll also be looking at what the default preference settings are (turning “show offline contacts” on by default, for example).

• Miscellaneous issues:

  • Script filters always run after plugin filters (ticket 1884):

    This results in %_statusMessage not working.

  • Improve “Passport Not Verified” Message (ticket 568):

    Fixing this would make an MSN error message clearer. Might be done for 1.0; might not.

  • Block Contact Toolbar Icon (ticket 1117):

    Just what it sounds like: an icon in the message window toolbar for blocking people.

  • File Transfer Fails to Unlock File (ticket 95):

    This causes some issues with modifying files after they’re sent to you.

  • Crash in -[NSTextView mouseMoved:] (ticket 2137):

    This seems to mostly occur when returning from being away. I’m not entirely sure why this crash happens; it may or may not be fixed for 1.0.

• Status:

  Basically, away/idle is pretty messed up.

  • Can’t return from custom available message (ticket 3382)

  • Can’t unidle (ticket 2453)

  • Can’t autoidle/away (ticket 2544)

• Localization:

  • French spelling errors (ticket 2055)

  • Truncated Italian button (ticket 2999)

  • Spacing check in localized nibs (ticket 2867)

• Stuff for when the code is done:

  • Help viewer (ticket 2335):

    Yes, we’re getting real Adium help files. They look pretty awesome so far 🙂

  • Set up appcasts (ticket 2646):

    This is setup for the new software update system, Andy Matuschak’s Sparkle.

If you’d like to work on Adium, we’d love to have your help. Join the #adium irc channel on chat.freenode.net and/or check out our guidelines for contributing code. IRC is where most development discussion happens.

SubEthaEdit from the Coding Monkeys rules, and here is why:

1) They are generally nice folks. For instance, any problems I’ve had they’ve been happy to help with. Oh, and they just donated licenses to the Adium project. Pretty sweet huh?

2) It’s a great text editor. I’ve used it as an all purpose editor for a while now, and it’s been pretty sweet.

3) The icon is pretty cool. Albeit I do prefer the older blue squishy guys to the newer green squishy guys icon, but it’s still a pretty sweet icon.

4) Collaborative editing is really beneficial to the project. Having 4 devs working on one class file at the same time really helps the development process along. It also really helps when someone is stuck on something, and is easier than pasting it somewhere and then going back and forth with it.

So ya, I like SEE 😀

We need access to a SOCKS4 proxy server, a SOCKS5 proxy server, and an HTTP proxy server for some connectivity testing. Please contact me if you have a reliable setup of one or all of these we could use. Thanks 🙂

I’d like to thank TheCodingMonkeys for their donation to the Adium team of a 20-seat SubEthaEdit license. We use SubEthaEdit (or SEE) fairly regularly for its great multi-user collaborative editing functionality which lets any number of people work on the same document — from code, aided by its language-appropriate syntax highlighting, to brainstorming sessions to changelogs — over the Internet or Bonjour. I personally use it as my TextEdit replacement, as well — I even have SVN_EDITOR=”see -w” in my .bashrc so I can write Subversion commit logs with it. We definitely recommend you check it out.