Whether you realize it or not, volunteers are the lifeblood of Adium. Every single one of us is a volunteer. All the work we do, we do for free. As such, it’s vital that we have a steady flow of willing contributors.

Some of you might have noticed that we have had some new faces lately. In the next few posts, we’d like to give some of those new faces a chance to introduce themselves. They all played a part in helping to get 1.4 out the door a few months ago.

Most of these guys have been around for months, if not years. Many were just fans of Adium and wanted to give back. There may be some of you out there who would like to do so as well. There’s always something to do. You don’t have to be an expert programmer to lend a hand; Even the best developer has to start somewhere. If you’d like to join our merry band of volunteers please take a look at our development page for more information.

Without further ado, I’d like to present our first introduction: Thijs Alkemade.

Hi folks,

Today, we launched a new Help section on the Adium website: http://adium.im/help. You will now be able to browse the same help content available in Adium (“Adium Help” in the Help menu) right from your browser. It should cover a lot of what you need to know about using Adium.

Additionally, there is a list of “hot issues” – known, commonly reported, recent problems that many people may be experiencing – for example, when a service has connectivity problems or requires you to change your settings (as was the case with Facebook Chat).

We are hoping that these pages will help solve some of the most common problems that you might run into while using Adium, and allow Trac to be reserved for development and other contributions instead of support.

Back when we announced the release of Adium 1.4, we also announced that you can now buy clothing with Adiumy on it.

Well, it’s been over two weeks. Your T-shirts, hoodies, and dog shirts should have arrived by now. Let’s see what it looks like!

I’ll start. Here I am, wearing an Adium hoodie:

Now it’s your turn. What do you (or what does your dog) look like in Adium clothing?

(Comments are on for this post only. Again, please don’t post bug reports in comments here—the correct place is over on the bug tracker. You can use imgur to host your photo(s); just put the image addresses in your comment, without HTML (don’t use <img src=…> or <a href=…>; they’ll get stripped out), and we’ll embed the images in your comment for you as we get to them.)

It’s been 2 weeks since we released version 1.4.  The response has been incredible. Now, hot on its heels, comes 1.4.1 with even more ducky goodness.

While the primary purpose of this update is to fix ICQ authentication[1][2], we stuck a few other goodies in there as well. (Did someone say ‘faster MSN file transfers’? 😉 ) We’ve upgraded from libpurple 2.6.6 to version 2.7.5 which brings with it the usual smörgåsbord of fixes and enhancements. For more details, you can read the release notes.

What’s up with ICQ?

For those that are unaware, ICQ is no longer owned by AOL. The breakage that users may have experienced was due to the change-over to the new authentication servers.

Users of Mac OS X 10.4 using Adium 1.3.10 can change the server setting to “login.icq.com” in the “Options” pane of their ICQ account’s settings.

SSL encryption is currently not supported server-side so we were forced to disable it in Adium 1.4.1.

Support and development

As always, if you find a bug or have a question, refer to the Help page. Please do not post it in the comments.

And if you’d like to help us out in any way, feel free to find out how you can contribute.

What’s next?

The next big issues on our list:

• fixing Facebook Chat support
• finding a solution to complaints about the changes made to the default message styles in 1.4

We’re thrilled by the response so far to Adium 1.4, with over 540,000 downloads in just 4 days.

We’re already hard at work on Adium 1.4.1. Please be sure to file constructive reports on Adium Trac – commenting in an existing ticket, if there is one, rather than clogging the system with duplicate tickets – to help us triage the amount important issues to address. Overall, the response has been resoundingly positive; please work with us as we continue to refine this huge release 🙂

As always, comments to this or any other blog post are not the appropriate forum for a bug report or question!

We are thrilled to announce the release of Adium 1.4, the culmination of an epic two years of development effort. This release features Twitter and a significantly better experience in group chats – including support for IRC. It’s jam-packed with hundreds of other new features and bug fixes, too. Adium 1.4 now requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or higher.

The contact list now supports contacts in multiple groups and instant searching in any configuration. This update also brings a better authorization window, updated and revamped message styles, new customization options, an updated version of libpurple, faster launch time, less memory usage, and better performance are just the tip of the King Eider iceberg. The full, staggering list of enhancements and bug fixes may be found in the full list of changes.

This is definitely our best release yet, and just think of what’s to come! 🙂

To celebrate the release of Adium 1.4, we’re also introducing official Adium apparel. You can pick any color Adiumy and sport it on any color t-shirt, plus some sharp long sleeve t’s and a hoodie. We’ve prepared a few stylish combinations in the merchandise store for you. Shirts come in men’s, women’s, and dog’s styles. The revenue from your purchase directly supports Adium.

Adium T-shirts!

Questions or comments? Got a cool idea for a new shirt configuration you want to see? Let us know!

Adium is an open source, volunteer, community effort. Want to see faster releases? See how you can help out by contributing code, assistance, or resources on our development page. You can also choose to donate, since we’ve joined Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit, it’s even tax-deductible.

We’re thankful to Network Redux for their immense server resources, and CacheFly for their staggering bandwidth. Without them, none of this would be possible.

We have received a multitude of reports of people not being able to connect to ICQ. From what we have found out it seems the problem lies with the German Telekom.

If you are experiencing this issue, please be patient.  We will provide an update when we know more.

Update: It looks like Telekom managed to resolve the issue before midnight (German time).

Hi folks,

Just a quick announcement for everyone using Facebook Chat in Adium:

If you’re experiencing problems, we recommend switching to the official XMPP implementation of Facebook Chat due to its increased stability instead of using Adium’s custom implementation which relied on the pidgin-facebookchat plugin.

You can find instructions on how to set up Facebook Chat via XMPP on the FacebookChat page of the Adium Wiki. Facebook has also released instructions.

We hope to offer a migration path from the old to the new implementation of Facebook Chat in a future version of Adium.

There are lots of reports coming in that some people have had their entire AIM buddy lists disappear. AOL is aware of the issue and they are looking into it.  If you are experiencing this issue, please be patient.  We will provide an update when we know more.

***UPDATE***

Everything seems to be back to normal.  If you’re still having trouble, it should be back up soon.

Hello folks,

We are closing in on the release of Adium 1.4 and have released a new beta, b18, today.

Most prominently, this release fixes Twitter support, disables Facebook authorisation requests and refreshes many translations. Adium 1.4b18 also takes libpurple to version 2.6.6 with some selected changes from 2.7.0 fixing Yahoo! Japan login and bringing greatly improved Gadu-Gadu support. It is available via Adium’s integrated Sparkle updating mechanism and at the beta page where you can also find the full list of changes made since b17.

Please test contact management in particular – combined contacts, (re)moving contacts and the like – since substantial parts of the contact lists have been rewritten for Adium 1.4.

Enjoy!