Pidgin, Songbird, and a Shirt

Alright, let's cut to the chase. I desperately want a ninja filled tshirt.


With the current state of the US dollar, it's probably a good time to prise $25 USD from my ever so tight pockets; but the penny pinching old grandfather in me just won't let me.

So, I have a plan:

1. Wait for either Gutsy Gibbon to land, or a decent feisty backport of pidgin


2. Learn just what exactly this dbus thing is


3. Use a mixture of kung fu and whinging to have Songbird inform Pidgin of what I'm playing, just like I've always wanted.

If I can get at least half way into doing that, then I can most probably convince myself:

• dbus is cool, and you are making something shiny enough that you deserve a t-shirt


• this is way too hard, you need a pity t-shirt

Either option is great for me.

Bugs

PHP

• lookupPrefix, lookupNamespaceURI do not work as expected
• setAttributeNS has inconsistent behaviour when raising exceptions

Thunderbird / Lightning

• FIXED: Add to Calendar reappears when mail is marked unread
  

Pidgin

• #460: Choose buddy icon should resize my icon for XMPP.
• #461: Tabs rendered upside down
• #458: Choose buddy icon interface resizes at will
• #459: Choose buddy icon UI doesn't list the current directory
• #542: Jabber: consider implementing XEP 202 / timezone information

Pidgin - new release

Pidgin (formerly Gaim) just got a new release - beta 7. It's had a fairly impressive restyle by one of the Tango Project designers.

There's also presumably under the hood changes, but damned if I can see them. Take a look at the image to the left to see the kind of style we're talking about.

Pidgin Poop

I know you can't foresee everything, but when you close your old bug trackers, can't you check that normal people can in fact log new tickets on your shiny new bug tracker?

developer.pidgin.com isn't currently logging me in properly; and has no "new ticket" link.

So when I got an email from sourceforge:

Comment By: Luke Schierer (lschiere)
Date: 2007-04-09 21:14

Message:
Logged In: YES
user_id=28833
Originator: NO

As we are closing this tracker, please submit any feature request that is
still valid to http://developer.pidgin.im. Thanks.

it's very frustrating that I can't log my issues - fixed! Hurray!

Further:

• The new mailing list software no longer puts in gaim-devel, so I have to get off my ass and change my email filters.
• The release notification plugin went splat, as I'm sure 95% of you all noticed.
• Grrarrgh
  

Gaim whinge pays off

Me:

Autoprofile looks to be a very useful plugin. Unfortunately, the maintainer
appears to have been busy and has more or less let it slide.

- how much effort would be involved in making it work on the latest
gaim?
- is anyone able to do so?
- does anyone know a better way to get in contact with the author and
give them a friendly hassling? (on the site; contact info doesn't appear to
reach them)

I know I'd certainly love to make use of it...

Gary Kramlich:

I talked to Casey tonight, and will be attempting to update it for a
release for beta6. This will be done via the sf project since I am now
a developer there as well. In any case, there is going to be a bit of
leg work, so don't hold your breath expecting it to come out right when
beta6 does ;)

See thread unmaintained plugin: autoprofile

How the hell does Jabber s2s / federation work?

I have my gmail account, I have my livejournal account, I even have a jabber.org account. I know livejournal is federated with google talk. Only gaim doesn't easily explain in the UI how the hell I sign in to my google talk account but talk to my contacts at livejournal.

What am I missing and why does this suck?

Update: What I really want is buddy adding UI hints.

Ethan Blanton (a gaim/c developer) scares me

I'm a list lurker on gaim-devel; and I don't usually read too much of it.

gaim is my one decent alternative to MSN, and it's good.

It's comments like this (emphasis is mine):

Almost a good point. Note that I don't care if there is *ever* a
build for Windows, or if it's ever updated, or if anyone ever uses it.
I am in favor of discontinuing Windows support, and have been from the
start.

Regardless of that, Windows Gaim is almost a different proposition
with respect to this debate ... it's even more beta than Unix Gaim
(largely because Windows is so horribly broken), as are the libraries
it depends on. It's probably inevitable that Windows users would have
to follow releases a bit more closely to stay on top of the bug game.
(NB: I know someone is going to come back and say something like "but
Windows users are users who need the bugfixed 'stable' releases most!"
or some crap ... see the previous paragraph. They can go buy a real
computer if they want.)

... which make me think twice about using it internally at my work.

What the hell world do C c developers live in? They seem so disconnected from end-users; it's astonishing. The world runs windows. Doing some development in windows is hard. Providing a shitty product for windows is easy. Getting your users to hate you is even easier.

For me, the reason I like open source and contribute back to projects is simple. It's the idea that I'm adding value to the world. I'm making life easier for someone - if it's myself; or someone suffering the same problems as I; I'm helping.

I don't think some people think of open source like that at all...

You can stop with the software releases now...

Songbird 0.2, Internet Explorer 7, Gaim 2.0.0beta4.

What a busy day.

Last.fm vs Google Music Trends

Google Talk just got a 'show my music' feature; like MSN has and like mIRC scripts have been doing since the dawn of time.

I wonder

• Is it easy to do what google talk has done as; say; a gaim plugin?
• Does the jabber protocol have features for this?
• How hard would it be to do a last.fm / audioscrobbler plugin that submits to google music trends?
• How hard would it be to make the google talk client know what songbird is playing?
• How hard would it be to make songbird export XSPF?
  

Recent development

News and Summer of Code updates.

Hurrah for the gaim-vv branch being merged back into the code!

A summary of where gaim is headed:

The “pencils down” date for the Summer of Code was September 1st. Here’s a list of some of the spectacular things the Summer of Code students accomplished during their two months.

Rendezvous Plugin (Juanjo Molinero Horno) – Wrote a protocol plugin (PRPL) that communicates with Apple’s iChat using the Bonjour protocol. The Bonjour protocol uses multicast DNS to automatically discover other Bonjour users on your local network. The PRPL currently uses the Howl library for multicast DNS, but we’d like to switch to using Avahi in the future. This in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
D-Busified gaim-remote (Piotr Zielinski) – Added D-Bus bindings to Gaim which allow other D-Bus aware programs to interact with Gaim. Removed the old, socked-based gaim-remote executable. It is being replaced by a python script that communicates with Gaim via D-Bus. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Improved Perl Scripting (John Kelm) – Fixed the problems with our Perl interpreter and added support for lots of Gaim’s newer functionality. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
UPnP NAT Traversal (Adam J. Warrington) – Gaim will now talk to your router and arrange for certain ports to be forwarded to your computer when doing file transfers. This should greatly improve file transfer success rates. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Gadu-Gadu Support (Bartosz Oler) – Our Gadu-Gadu protocol plugin is now using a much more recent version of libgadu. Many many improvements were made, and this protocol plugin is now working very well. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
SIP/SIMPLE (Thomas Butter) – We now have a working protocol plugin for doing IM over a SIP connection, compatable with kphone, iptel.org and sipgate.de. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
ICQ File Transfer (Jonathan Clark) – ICQ file transfer turned out to be pretty easy, since new versions of ICQ use the same file transfer protocol as AIM. After Jonathan got that working, he went on to add support for proxying a file through AOL’s file transfer proxy servers, and made lots of other improvements to the file transfer code used by both AIM and ICQ. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim. Some of his changes also made it into earlier releases of Gaim.
Music Messaging (Christian Muise) – Music Messaging is a Gaim plugin that allows collaborative musical score editing. It uses the SoC DBus Gaim project to link Gaim with a score editor that is geared to use this functionality. This requires the DBus plugin to be operational. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
SMS PC-to-mobile routing over Bluetooth (Mel Dooki) – This project does not releate directly to Gaim, but we thought it was neat. Mel wrote a Java client that runs on a computer. The user types an SMS, the client transfers the message to a cell phone via Bluetooth, then another program on the cell phone transmits the SMS. See the SMS Routing over Bluetooth webpage for more information.
Crazy Chat (Charlie Stockman) – TODO
Doodle (Andrew Dieffenbach) – Created a “whiteboard” system for Gaim and used it to implement Yahoo!’s Doodle protocol. It may need a little more work before it’s completely compatable with current Yahoo! clients, but it works fine between two Gaim users. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Collaborative Code Editor (Chisthian Kim) – TODO

See more progress on: Fix gaim

Heh: Google is *so* doing this goal

I wonder what he’ll be able to do if he can get a few more googlers using their 20% project time on gaim?

Google’s just hired Sean Egan (the main developer of Gaim open IM client), just the same day Yahoo! and Microsoft plan to link their respective proprietary IM networks.” From the post: “While Yahoo! and Microsoft link their proprietary networks for Instant Messaging, Google bets on Open Protocols to make information universally accessible … Currently, Google uses XMPP/Jabber specs, but they claim to be supporting open server-to-server federation, and work “to hear from other people in the communications industry about how best to build a federation model that is open, scalable”. In fact, there are this month several tests with firms like EarthLink, Sipphone or PeopleCall.

Article

See more progress on: Fix gaim

MSN Messenger 7

Ooh.

Alright, I'll admit there's no love lost between me and msn messenger on an average day. Version 6, which is what I'd stuck with, was slow, crappy, annoying to use and painful. At work, I get by with the stripped version, windows messenger without too much pain. But, since I'm an internet person, invaribly I have stupid people who just don't get it and annoy me at the wrong times.

Version 6 had massive failings. Version 7 has fixed a lot of them. The ideas weren't necessarily born all at Microsoft either: I notice MSN now goes with the GAIM style "display a picture" for a user for instance.

But we're ahead of ourselves.

Getting It

Difficulty: Hard.
I am a web veteran. I use firefox, I make websites, I know how to work them. I followed the steps on auto pilot, skimming ahead and not realizing I'd come to a complete stop on the website.
The problem? Some clever monkey has javascript to trigger the download automagically and show you a list of post installation directions.
Some other clever monkey has put two doctype declarations in, and two html opening tags. Haphazard work: how hard is it to run a html validator over your pages? Impossible, it seems. Well, so long as it works in Internet Explorer, we don't care.
Annoyingly, I had to back track many steps and click on the "download and install later". It took a good 5 minutes of puzzling to work out where that was hidden. Surely, you want your users to be able to get your free product...

Installing

Difficulty: Easy.

Hello stupid! You are now installing MSN. Click next to install MSN.

Thank you, installer. The logic of this is about on par with H2G2's talking doors. Thank you for opening me. You are now opening me. Duh. Click through boilerplate. No major hassles, just slight redundancy.
Also, it pushes the install MSN product family angle: a business objective probably, so it's company centred not user centred. Tsk. I don't want your sleazy MSN search.

Starting

Difficulty: Easy. I don't like it. It tells me I've got problems, and it can't connect because I'm running through a HTTP proxy. Eh? Rubbish. Your more primitive cousin worked moments ago!
I looked about and found what was wrong: it had disregarded many of the old settings from MSN 6 and stole them from Internet Explorer somewhere, it'd gone to what I'd need to have if this computer was at work.
Luckily, this pushed me to look at some of the non obvious things. I disabled a bunch of them.

Someone messaged me. The message history had XML flaws, and it offered to clean that up for me. Nice! I told them to shush, and go away, because it was an annoying person.

Overall: it seems faster and cooler and sexier. There's images for users, a split between nickname and message, and all sorts.
No longer do I have to deal with idiots who change their display name to a flavour of the day, so I lose track. Hurrah.
Also, since people stick normally to fairly constant avatars, if they do change their names I still have a visual tag to associate with them. Nice!

There's a contact card feature. Useful, because I often want to find out more info without having to fire up the webbrowser. This is a polished version of what GAIM has.

Mmm. MSN Spaces. No idea. I'll come back to it soon. Non obvious what it was, but it explained well enough.

Annoyance: you can kill the toolbars, but you can't stick it to the top of your screen, because the toolbars are really just invisible, and still there.

Plus: I can see my own display info.

Annoyance: I can't edit my own phone numbers / etc details on my contact card by clicking on them.

Annoyance: Advertising is still intrusive. Why not make it less visible but in more places? Ie, adwords here would be cool.

Annoyance: Internet Explorer hasn't been my browser for years. Why is it being opened to change web settings?

Summary: tricks to take to GAIM

• User avatars on the left hand side of the screen (ie, before nicknames) as opposed to on the right (gaim) is smarter.
• Cropping nicknames instead of expanding the window with a scrollbar is smart.
• Status in text on right on nickname is good, lighter color. Overlaid on avatar is better.
• Setting a status ahead of signin is cool.

We'll see how well it does against the stress of a hangover tomorrow.