Filed under: Software, Open Source
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!
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tubby Bartles said 12:33PM on 3-08-2007
Hm. How about some of the very basic blocking & tackling features to just keep Adium up with GAIM. They have a huge list of features like that, such that new tickets filed just get duplicated in favor of those, but nobody's actually doing them.
Examples: Group chat rooms in Jabber being added to your contacts list, plug-ins to make a sound when certain strings appear in a chat window (very useful in group chats to notify you when somebody calls your name!), etc. All of these are in GAIM already, but everybody wants to do Video Chat in Adium instead of adding the basics.
Reply
Testar said 12:54PM on 3-08-2007
hmmmm.
Try amsn.sf.net
At least they care about users opinion, and do things that are hard to do.
Reply
Antonio said 1:11PM on 3-08-2007
But I'm just one man. What can I do?
Reply
Chris Forsythe said 1:55PM on 3-08-2007
@antonio: Only 5-6 people work on Adium. A single person can do a lot.
@Tubby: Like I mentioned in the post, we just need more hands. Gaim has more devs than we do, so they can do more than we can.
@testar: We care about what users say and do hard things. aMSN is focused on just MSN, so they can tackle all of the MSN stuff without having to worry about the other protocols. If we didn't care about what users thought, we wouldn't have forums or trac.
Reply
Tango said 1:56PM on 3-08-2007
If I had a Mac, I would totally help.
Reply
uros said 6:37PM on 3-08-2007
I tell you: adding A/V capabilities to Adium will surely make you the No.1 multi-protocol IM client on the Mac... And the reason I (as an MSN user) use Adium instead of aMSN, is because it feels to me (maybe to other people too) like aMSN wasn't designed to be used on Mac OS X like any regular Mac app. It's a thing I've noticed with some non-Mac-native cross-platform OSS apps [wow, could that sentence have been longer?]. Anyhow, (with all due respect to the aMSN team) I think such a Mac-like app as Adium plus video-conferencing would certainly trump its competitors. Well, as an excuse for this not-too productive comment, I would help Adium if only i knew ANYTHING about coding applications...
Reply
Chris Forsythe said 7:42PM on 3-08-2007
Oh we also need css/xhtml folks and applescripts and people helping with user requests uros, don't let not knowing how to code stop you, it doesn't stop me. :)
Reply
zerock said 8:17PM on 3-08-2007
Tubby, adium already has blocking and privacy settings.
Reply
Primoz said 8:30PM on 3-08-2007
AdiumX alredy is the best chat client on OS X... With video/audio features, who needs anything else?
No knowledge of coding OS X apps, but I could help with CSS/XHTML. what're the requirements?
Reply
Chris Forsythe said 5:16AM on 3-09-2007
@primoz
All of our message window styles are xhtml/css/javascript/$web language. Download one from the xtras site, then ctrl+click/show package contents and dig around. http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/CreatingMessageStyles has information about the format specifically
Reply
Tubby Bartles said 8:42PM on 3-09-2007
First, let me specify that Adium is my client of choice; I realize there are others, but none is as good. I even gave money. I certainly didn't mean to imply otherwise, as some of the emails are trying to convince me to switch.
My only point was that Adium is best because of the basic blocking & tackling. It's best at the little things I do every day. I certainly would like fancy features like video chat, but I would much prefer if the engineers would take a week or two and just each tackle 5 of the little feature requests/improvements than have been hanging around forever. Wouldn't it be cool to put features to a vote, actually? Just list the feature tickets and let people come say what they want as they download? Or let people vote only if they donate...
Reply