February 04, 2007
New Adium
For those folks who are interested, we just put out Adium 1.0
For those folks curious, working on odds and ends to get Adium 1.0 is why the latest weekly cocoa has been postponed.
Also, I purchased an xbox 360. This may also have something to do with it. Between the Wii and the 360, I don't know how much computer I can fit into my day any longer. At least I beat zelda twice!
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 02:07 AM | Comments (3)
May 23, 2006
Interviewed on CocoaRadio for Adium
A little while back I met up with Blake from CocoaRadio for an awesome enchilada with an egg on top. Later on in the year he interviewed me about Adium and Growl.
The first interview has been posted. It's for Adium. Go here to find out more.
This is the first part of a two part series.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2005
Interviewed
I was interviewed by Victor over at MacNN
Here is a link to that podcast.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
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)
August 01, 2005
What I've been up to
So in the last couple of months, I haven't posted much. This has more to do with the fact that the server was changed (and I did not backup my database because I wanted to sorta start new) than anything else.
So with this in mind, this post is going to be long.
Growl
Growl is doing really well. We have had about 40,000 downloads of .7 now, so this gives a form of validation. I'll be pushing beta 5 out tomorrow, and hopefully .7.1 next week sometime.
Growl .8 is going to take a while. A lot of stuff is being refactored, so that in the long run Growl should hopefully be easier to code on. This is being done, and hopefully Growl .8 will be out by Christmas.
Chatkit
So in the long run, Adium, Fire, and Proteus (the 3 main chat clients on os x) are all reimplementing the same things over and over. If you add it up, we all probably fix the same problem different ways with over 100 man hours wasted a year.
My thoughts on this for a while had been that we could all work together on some things. My previous entries regarding emoticon standards (which I gave up on) show this to some extent. For about 3 months, Adam and I have been discussing this indirectly. We ended up naming the idea Chatkit, then getting ideas going on it, involving people from multiple projects. We just started the project last week actually, and so far it's been slow going but fun. I'll talk about this more later though.
Coal
About 3 weeks ago I started thinking of something new as well. Every time I was talking with someone over im for a one week period, I would continually need to open up log files/search something on google/find something on amazon/use spotlight.
Then I remembered dashboard (later became beagle), and thought we could use a splash of something like it on os x. jfro is going to investigate this further, and has a working way to get at the data we'd need to get to. The general idea is that this is data mining, hence the name Coal. If it doesn't work out, we can still have a nice gui to do spotlight+internet all at one time. That in itself would be convenient.
Adium
I've been working less and less on Adium. My initial goals were only known by the two team leads. Overall though, the idea is to help the project in the eventual case where developers drop out of wanting to work on it. Keeping people interested has been my thought process on a lot of it, and so far it's worked out pretty well. My need to work directly with developers in order for this goal to be achieved is pretty much gone now, so folks are probably seeing me less and less.
Myko Games
So apparently I started something called Myko Games inadvertently. Basically the idea is to have a game system that works with multiple clients on os x, in order to allow mac users to play games such as chess and tic-tac-toe. Long time Adium users might remember tic-tac-toe, which this evolved from (somewhat). Here is the real story though:
Skyler (otherwise known as freakman) decided he wanted to have an easter egg inside of Adium. Skyler finally landed on wanting to put a 10 mb movie file hidden inside the "About Adium" dialogue.
Yes, I said that. He wanted to put a 10 megabyte file in Adium. And he wanted it to only be activated when people went to the About panel, and only for some weird key combination. Guess what we said..
Anyhow, in order to keep him interested in it, I suggested that he put games into Adium instead. Eventually we landed on the idea that other clients would like to have this too, and hence IMGames started. Unfortunately the name IMGames is taken, so Myko was chosen (lord if I know what it means). And so, apparently I helped to start Myko Games and save Adium from the 10 movie monster.
Randomness
Oh, and to address this blog entry by Peter and why I revived my posting grounds. I was not worried. Rather, at the time I just was not going to use something that the folks who do jep wrangling did not recommend implementing. Also, dragging up one of my posts from last year wasn't such a great idea either. But since it's been brought up, the initial work I've done will probably make its way into Chatkit, in a much simpler format than described in that jep.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)