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October 23, 2005
Status of Adium X, and the road to 1.0
Adium right now depends on a couple of things:
Growl
Libgaim
Adium 1.0 will depend on the following:
joscar
Growl .8
Libgaim 2.0.0
LMX (Something Catfish_Man and Mac-Arena are creating)
It may also depend on something called Smack, from Jive.
Durin is doing a lot of the joscar work, and if it's not too much for him in the time frame we are looking at, then integrating it may end up being better for jabber (and google talk) users.
Growl itself is doing a source cleanup, of a pretty big magnitude (for the Growl project that is). As some of you know, I'm project lead on Growl, along with being project manager of Adium, so I can lend some information here as well:
Growl is currently doing a somewhat major rewrite of a lot of core code, as dictated in http://trac.growl.info/trac/ticket/114 . Once this is done, we can move on to some of the more baser features, and finish with the redesign of the applications tab. We've redone a lot of the applications tab in the hopes that it will be easier to use. We have some basic positioning in currently, which Ofri started on. Positioning, as most Growl users know, is one of our most requested features.
Growl also brought on 2 new extras from external parties, Rawr-Jour and Feed. Feed is a rss reader, and Rawr-Jour notifies based on some things. Both should hopefully show off Growl's benefits. Feed itself is a minimal reader (not as featureful as NNW and others), but should show why someone would want to use an RSS/Atom reader with Growl.
Growl .8 I have targetted for sometime before the end of March, but hopefully we have it done in February.
So that's Growl, on to Libgaim
Libgaim 2.0.0 depends on Gaim 2.0.0. From the Gaim blog, it looks like they are reaching a lot completion of it. My understanding is that they have done a lot to separate the backend from the Gaim gui. That said, it is a major change in how a lot of things work, meaning a lot of work for us to do on Adium. Integrating new features may end up waiting for after 1.0.
LMX is hopefully going to make logging a little better, and things in Adium a little faster in general. Two Adium devs are working on it, but it is a separate project altogether, and as such is going to be treated as a dependency.
So with all that said, I'm looking at Adium 1.0 taking from now until end of May, sorta. This may be way off too, but overall everyone is busy, and it's just going to take a while. Adium .85, minus the rate limiting bugs which .85.1 should fix, is in general pretty stable. .86 may happen, depending on if the bug fixes there really justify a new release or we should just wait for 1.0 on them.
A lot of us are on multiple projects, and our time is split between them and our lives. Myself, I'm currently working 11 hour days, reading my objective c book, and trying to pay attention to the wife which I am very lucky to have. I know the others have just as busy lives, so you all just need to be patient while we try to set everything up for a big run.
We do need some new people. We need someone to work on the Applescript support in Adium, along with other things. Remedial tasks such as helping with tickets can also help us, along with other things.
My goal is to have Adium and Growl entered into the wwdc contests next year. With the amount of work we have, I don't know if that is feasible for both projects, but we can definitely give it a good shot.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)
Future of Growl?
So with 10.5 I keep hearing rumors that Apple is going to do a Watson or a Konfabulator, and either snatch up Growl or reimplement Growl. I figure I need to address these issues, and I should go ahead and do it now:
1) Growl is BSD licensed, meaning that Apple is very much allowed to snag all the Growl code and use it for their own. Even if they don't implement Growl, they could reuse stuff we've made and thus not have to recreate it.
2) With Watson, I believe the guy making Watson was offered a job at Apple to work on Sherlock, and he declined. He also sold it to Sun, probably for a sizeable amount.
Whereas with Konfab, Arlo made a huge hissy about it, in an very good attempt at gaining media recognition right before releasing a windows version. It worked well, and he sold to Yahoo.
3) All I ever wanted is for something like Growl to be in OS X/Windows/X Desktop systems for Linux and *BSD. I really just want to use it, I don't care who implements it.
So, with all that said. Should Apple take Growl or reimplement it, so long as they implement the features I need, I would be glad they did it. Growl would still be viable on 10.3/10.4. We could make the frameworks talk to the in system notification system on 10.5 as a convenience for applications, so they don't have to worry about it on 10.5 and it's already implemented in their app.
I'd prefer if they grabbed Growl entirely and just used it. We could use some Apple gui polish, and a full time dev on the project.
In either case, if Apple grabs it, I'd be pretty happy, and if they implement something similar, I'd be pretty happy.
So where does that leave the Growl Project? Why, at the Extras/Scripts of course. The Growl Extras have just added 2 third party applications, Rawr-Jour and Feed to the Growl Extras, and I might look for a few others down the road.
This means these applications get the benefits of the Growl development system, and the Growl Project gets some new Extras. It works out to be a decent deal all around.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)
Is this thing on?
So, what's new? I haven't posted in forever and a few months, so this one will be sort along, as always.
Coal is dead. Basically, the idea was good but there just wasn't enough time. Oh well, spotlight's interface still sucks, I still use quicksilver, so does Jerome.
Chatkit, on the other hand, is not. Ofri got some code in today (or was it yesterday?). It's not really tested, but it is a start. It's for rendezvous/bonjour, and gives us something to start on.
I've been move up to being called the Project Manager for Adium, officially. This doesn't change much, as I've been operating the same way for the last two years with Adium, this just makes it official. It's kinda neat, I manage two projects now, both with two different styles of management, and both with their own sets of problems. The good part here is that Adium depends on Growl, and as Project Lead on Growl, that helps Adium out quite a bit.
I was offered a position with DefaultMind, the owners of Proteus. The position was for two unrelated software titles. I eventually turned this down. Apparently some people got word of this before they were supposed to know, albeit I do not really know how. One person thought it was a huge deal and wanted to post about it, I said no, and now he's angry at me. Guess it turns out good for him.
Growl itself is in the middle of a large codebase refactorization (is that a word?). I say middle, because half of the related tickets are closed. We've gained two people who can help with this, so the process should speed up some. Growl .8 will have positioning, and hopefully close widgets for notifications, meaning that managing the notifications will be easier.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)