Adium
Latest
Adium devs need YOU
Adium 1.0.1 is a great (and long-awaited) release for the free & open-source multiplatform chat client. The work, however, continues, and the Adium developers are politely asking for your help. First, there are a slew of items that need user feedback, and you can do that, right? Second, additional skilled devs are wanted so that some of the "cool but challenging" features on deck (video and audio chat, anyone?) can be tackled. Let's show the fine folks behind the quacking some TUAW love.Thanks Nik!
DuckCall
DuckCall is a nifty little utility that is a one-trick pony, but it's a pretty cool trick. Every 30 seconds it takes a snapshot with your iSight camera and sets that picture as your iChat or Adium buddy picture. The author notes that it's "very crude, and consists of a PyObjC wrapper round a stand-alone binary (to get the picture from the iSight) and a bunch of AppleScript (to set the picture into iChat / Adium)." As you can see to the right (behold my thoroughly unattractive office bookshelves), it works fine on my MacBook with iChat (I didn't test it with Adium). This is a pretty neat idea for personalizing your iChats when a full video chat is not an option.[Via FreeMacWare]
Fire.app Closes Shop
After almost 8 years in production, the open-source instant messaging application Fire has come to an end. Pre-dating even iChat, Fire was the first multi-protocol client on the platform, and has long had a dedicated user base. The loss of multiple key members of the development team and a reliance on legacy frameworks which were no longer being updated caused key members of the development team to reconsider their future plans and cease active development. Fortunately for fans of the software, two of Fire's developers have joined the Adium team, and the two applications are already integrating features. Users switching from Fire to Adium can choose to have all of their contacts, logs, away messages, and groups transferred to the new software.
Big News: Adium Hits the Big 1.0
After 4 years of hard work by almost 30 volunteers, instant messaging application Adium has finally reached version 1.0. The most significant update to the program in over a year and a half, the update brings with it a slew of new features, bug fixes, and added functionality. I've been using the 1.0 since it hit beta on July 4th of last year, and it is truly a treat to interact with. As for the new features, here's the shortlist: Working Direct Connect and file transfer. Global user profile and buddy icon. Xtras manager. Completely overhauled interface and icons. Redesigned log viewer. Major privacy enhancements. Full changelog here. Adium is open-source and available as a free download.
Twitter widgets, plugins and scripts - oh my!
I seem to be going gaga over web services lately. After dropping my .Mac personal blog for Vox, Twitter is another new-ish service that has also weaseled its way into my daily activities (they launched this past summer). While there are a few explanations for what Twitter really is and does, I like to think of it as a 'status message for your life.' At Twitter's site you can enter a few words or a sentence or two about what you're up to (much like the status message in your chat app), and receive updates when your friends change their status. But it doesn't have to stay at the site. You can embed your Twitter updates in your blog and use them as your Adium status. Twitter lets you receive updates on your phone or even over IM, and you can use both of those to send your own updates back to Twitter. It might sound silly before you actually try it out, but it can easily become addicting if you let yourself surrender to the fun and sign up. If you're getting hooked like me, some users have started a Twitter Fan Wiki to round up all the fun tools that are coming out of Twitter's quickly growing community. While there is stuff here for everything from Windows Smartphones to WordPress widgets and even Ruby scripts, there are some great Mac-centric tools that I really like. The first is the Adium plugin I already mentioned, which lets you embed your Twitter message as your available/away status in Adium. If you want to be able to use Twitter for both an away and an available message, be sure to give them different names, like 'Twitter Away / Twitter Available.' The next two are Dashboard widgets, of course. Twitgit allows you to see a list of your friends' status and enter your own, while Twidget is a straight-up box that simply lets you enter a status. Finally, there's Celly, which seems to do nothing more than pull down random Twitter status messages from across the public channel.With these tools in your belt, you should be able to spend a lot less time when letting people know what you're spending your time on. Isn't redundant technology grand?
Adium 1.0 beta screenshots
I spend a lot of time in chat (I'm very popular) and sadly all of my friends and colleagues refuse to use the same IM protocol. That's why I eschew iChat and use Adium instead. One of the developers behind Adium gives us a peek at how the beta 1.0 release is shaping up. Before you ask, Adium 1.0 won't support voice/video chat which is just fine with me.This release looks very promising
An Adium Xtra for linking any browser's current page
I know Adium can insert links from some browsers by itself, but I just found a script at the Adium Xtras site which offers much more fine-grained control over inserting a link from any browser, with the page name's descriptive title linked nice and clean, instead of the long ugly URL you get from copy/pasting. As you can see, specific commands are included for all the major browsers (and even some not-so-major ones), as well as a catch-all Default Browser command. The ones I can test seem to work pretty well, though I'll admit I don't have any copies of iCab or Netscape lying around. Enjoy.
AOL breaks Adium betas
If you're a user of the recent Adium 1.0 beta releases, and you've been having issues connecting to AIM, you're not alone. According to reports in the official IRC channel and from developers, AOL did something to change the connection protocol, specifically involving the new joscar connection protocol, connection rate limiting, and buddy icon requests. Users experiencing problems have three options: 1. Take a break! Enjoy your newly found freedom from the constant barrage of instant messages. 2. Use a web-based IM service such as meebo.3. Replace your Adium beta with the older .89.1 build.Note: AOL responds to the rapid connections this problem causes by locking out your account for a few minutes. The more you try and connect while you're locked out, the longer the lock stays.
Foom Software
Chris Forsythe and Evan Schoenberg (Adium Lead and Project Managers) just announced a joint venture in the form of new Mac shareware company Foom Software. I understand their excitement in wanting to announce the new project, but it feels a bit premature to go public at this point considering that Foom currently has no software announced or available for download, and won't for at least another month, according to Chris's blog. Foom will be working with the only person Google does not know about Chris Emery, and Vina Venkatesh of MP3 Alarm Clock fame on their secret new mystery product. It may not be big news now, but it's something to stick in your newsreader and keep an eye on.
Top ten supplemental blogging apps
Chances are if I am sitting at my Mac I am blogging (perhaps not for TUAW, but for some blog somewhere) and so this list of the top ten supplemental blogging apps for OS X caught my eye.The apps that make the cut are: Quicksilver (a TUAW favorite) Firefox (though Flock gets a mention) Pukka NewsFire Transmit Image Trick TextMate Voice Candy Dictionary.app Adium and Skype A fairly good list, though it doesn't cover some of the apps I use whilst blogging. After the jump you'll find my list of blogging apps I can't blog without.
Adium's icon designer on its past, present and future
You might not know who Adam Betts is, but you've probably seen, or at least heard of, some of his work which includes the icon of a pretty famous Mac OS X chat client: Adium. The animated, quacking duck icon has made a bit of a name for itself, and Phill Ryu (of MacThemes and Widget Machine fame) decided to sit down with Adam Betts and quack ecstatic about the icon's past, present and future. Check it out for Adam's take on everything from Apple's icon guidelines (believe it or not, they have them) to whether Adiumy the Duck will get his own MySpace profile.[via diggdot.us]
Adium 1.0b1 Released
After months of work, the excellent multiple network instant messenging program, Adium, has reached version 1.0b1, and this release is a great one. It sports major improvements to interactions with AIM, ICQ, and .Mac IM networks, iTunes integration, the default look and feel and privacy options. It now requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 and is a universal binary.Please note that this is still in beta, though I was using it last night without any significant problems presenting themselves.[Thanks to those who sent us this tip.]
Adium to be a Google Summer of Code project
Adium, the open source multi-network chat client with more features than I thought existed, has recently announced that they are going to be a mentoring project in this year's Google Summer of Code. For those unfamiliar: it's a program that brings students together to collaborate on and learn about open source programming. Each summer Google accepts and offers many different projects that students may apply to work on, as you can see from their extensive list.Adium's list of available projects is quite lengthy as well, which should be good news for fans and users of the app. I have honestly never paid that much attention to the Google Summer of Code events before, but I do know that they have improved or given birth to a lot of great OSS in the past. Good luck to Adium and company![via Daring Fireball]
Adium X 0.88 an Universal application
You were tired of running Adium X in Rosetta, weren't you? Now you can run it in native mode thanks to the 0.88 release. This release also includes a few bug fixes (including a reconnect from sleep issue that was plaguing some) and an Australian localization (I would make a joke but I have offended too many people as of late so no Aussie joke for you, mate).If you're into full version histories check out Adium's here.Thanks, Neil.
