In addition to the CNET award that Adium was nominated for, I was also contacted by about.com’s IM guru to tell us that they were now accepting nominations for the 2008 IM Best Awards.

He writes:

One of the most frequently asked questions I get as guide to Instant Messaging at About.com just so happens to be “Which Instant Messenger is the Best?”

Well, this year, I have decided to allow the readers to answer for themselves through our 2008 IM Best Awards, delivering top honors to all our favorite instant messengers, new developments and the developers themselves.

Now through noon EST, on Friday, March 28, 2008, we are accepting nominations for this honor in all the following categories:

*Best Instant Messenger Experience, measuring overall user experience;
*Most Improved Instant Messenger, based on back-to-back client releases;
*Best Mac Instant Messenger, based on overall user experience;
*Best Third-Party IM
*Best IM Feature
*and Best IM Developer(s) of the Year.

Winners in each category will be given featured Essentials placement for one year on http://im.about.com, in addition to all the bragging rights among the IM community.

If you’d like to show us some love drop Brandon an email and tell him what you think!

Once again, Adium has been invited to participate in Google Summer of Code. We’ll be accepting applications from talented student programmers to work on a variety of interesting projects; Students can either pick an idea from our list or propose an idea of their own (creativity is encouraged!).

For those unfamiliar with Summer of Code, each summer Google sponsors hundreds of open source organizations to mentor students as they work for a summer on a project associated with their organization of choice. Students receive $4,500 USD, a T-shirt, a prestigious item to put on their resumé, and a huge learning opportunity in exchange for 3 months of working on fun open source projects. If that sounds like a great deal to you, get your application(s) in!

In prior years we’ve had successful student projects improving XMPP support, accessibility, group chat, contact list organization, AppleScript, Bonjour IM, and tabbed chatting. In fact, a large percentage of the improvements in Adium 1.1 and 1.2 are the direct result of student work as part of Summer of Code.

Adium is a finalist in the CNET 2008 Webware 100 Awards in the communications category. Voting doesn’t require any registration so just takes a moment; please consider casting a vote for your favorite duck-themed instant messaging client!

It seems that The Mac Nose has outed our very own Colin Barrett as a wizard! I always thought there was something different about that guy…  And now we know the truth.

Big thanks to The Mac Nose (whoever he is…) for bringing this matter to our attention.

You can read the full story here.

Today, Apple released the iPhone SDK. And, as we expected, we’re already being asked whether we intend to write a version of Adium for the iPhone.

The short answer is “yes, but…”.

Developing for the iPhone is similar in many respects to development for Mac OS X. Some of the same frameworks, such as Core Audio, are present. But a lot of them aren’t. For example:

• QuickTime (which we use to play sounds) is missing entirely. There’s a new Core Audio API to play sounds, but it’s Leopard-only, and we don’t know whether it’s available on the iPhone.
• The Application Kit (on which our interface is built) is replaced with UIKit.
• The iPhone probably does not have Apple Events nor Open Scripting Architecture. In other words, no AppleScript.
• Animation works a bit differently, and is dramatically different from how animation currently works in Adium on Mac OS X.

The hardware poses challenges as well. The iPhone has less memory than Adium tends to use, and has a significantly slower processor (and only one of them). Also, maintaining a network connection over WiFi uses a significant amount of battery, which could pose a problem for long-term use.

So porting Adium to the iPhone will certainly be a lot of work. Large portions, if not almost everything, will need to be completely rewritten or scrapped. Other parts will survive, but undergo extensive changes. This is a lot of work.

Currently, Adium’s base system requirement is Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). Some of the iPhone’s features, such as Core Animation, were introduced in Leopard (10.5). Therefore, it’s likely that we won’t start work on Adium for iPhone until sometime after Adium for Mac requires Leopard.

Also, keep in mind that we’ll want to release that version of Adium for Mac and have it proven by users (that means you) before we go applying that knowledge to Adium for the iPhone. You wouldn’t want us to port an unstable version, would you? ☺

So, in summary: We want to do it, but it will be a lot of work. We want to put it off for a little bit so that it can be done with less effort and won’t interfere with other development priorities. We don’t know how long we’ll put it off and we don’t know how long it will take once we start.

AOL announced Open AIM 2.0 today, and we’ve had a number of people ask what this means for Adium. I spoke with Michael Hall of instantmessagingplanet.com earlier today; AOL Opens AIM Some More has an explanation of Open AIM and some of my comments on the topic.

Chris Forsythe, aka The_Tick , is retiring from the position of Adium Project Manager after 3 years of hard work in that capacity and several years before that of deep involvement in the Adium community. As Project Manager, Chris helped ensure that the diverse assets of the community – web site, support network, forums, etc. – ran smoothly and aided in directing the project itself. On behalf of the team and all who have benefited from his dedicated efforts, I’d like to thank Chris heartily 🙂

Eric Richie , who wrote the in-application help for Adium and heads the Ticket Task Force, has volunteered to step up into the position and is the new Adium Project Manager. 🙂

Adium 1.2.3 is now available. This is a quick bugfix release which exists primarily to address an issue in Adium 1.2.2 which prevented Yahoo! Messenger accounts with non-@yahoo.com usernames from connecting. It also fixes failures with certain additional message styles from AdiumXtras and corrects a few other minor issues with Adium 1.2.x. The version history has the details. Quack on!

A number of you have reported being unable to sign into Yahoo! using Adium 1.2.2. We’ve discovered the problem; this post is to tell you what we did wrong and what we’re doing about it.

When you enter a Yahoo! email address (such as jdoe@yahoo.com) into the username field in Adium 1.2 and later, Adium strips off the @yahoo.com part before trying to sign in with it. This is because Yahoo! expects only the jdoe part (the username); signing in with the whole email address will result in an unknown-username error.

Back on the 11th of February, Evan committed this change:

Yahoo accounts shouldn’t include the @domain.suffix regardless of what it is (e.g. @yahoo.com, @yahoo.it). Generalize our removal to account for this.

Before that change, we looked for “@yahoo.com” specifically, and removed it if present. This didn’t work for other Yahoo! suffixes, such as “@yahoo.it”. Thus, Evan intended to make Adium delete all Yahoo! suffixes, not just the US one.

The code that Evan committed removes any email-address suffix—in other words, if there’s an @, Adium will remove that and anything after it before trying to log in. This was a good plan, except for those who use Yahoo! AT&T.

SBC was a US telephone company, which became AT&T back in 2005. SBC offered, and AT&T still offers, an internet connection with Yahoo! services bundled, including Yahoo! Messenger. Instead of a plain old “jdoe” username, these customers’ Yahoo! IDs are their entire “jdoe@sbcglobal.net” address. For these users, stripping off the “@sbcglobal.net” suffix makes sign-in not work.

So, this is a regression. I’ve already committed a fix: we now only strip the suffix if the suffix starts with “@yahoo.”, so that “@yahoo.com”, “@yahoo.it”, etc. will be stripped but “@sbcglobal.net” won’t). That fix is present in what will be 1.2.3. While we’re at it, we know of a couple other regressions which we’ll also fix in 1.2.3.

Thanks for your patience, everyone.

News flash! Minor release of Adium with a major number of bug fixes! Grab it while supplies last!

Adium 1.2.2 is now available. It fixes a variety of bugs and crashes and is a recommended download for all Mac OS X 10.4 or later folk. Check the version history for the details.

Don’t forget to read Contributing to Adium to learn how you can submit patches and code, help hunt down bugs, and donate to support the project!

We greatly appreciate the donated resources of our excellent site and code host NetworkRedux and our download host CacheFly. 🙂