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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.