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What's your recipe for IM in Spicebird?

Mon, 21/04/2008 - 11:00 — prasad

Most of you would have already seen the IM that we had in the 0.4 release and a lot of feedback did reach us.  There were thoughts on improving the windows, the integration and requests to support more IM protocols (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ and more).  We did brain-storm a lot on how to solve these issues, and here is the new Telepathy based recipe we came up with.  We are still experimenting and are not really sure how this experiment would end up, specially for Windows.

  1. Get DBus to run on windows, probably using WinDBus
  2. Get dbus-glib to compile (the build system, argh)
  3. Get telepathy-glib to work on windows (any experiences?)
  4. Make spicebird use telepathy - Design dialogs and write code!

I will keep blogging on the progress, but do the readers have anything to say on this front?  What are your experiences with Telepathy on Linux and MAC?

Comments

Fri, 09/05/2008 - 17:25 — Anonymous

The IM goal, an alternative

A commenter to another blog entry mentioned the new Instantbird IM project. It is an Mozilla XULRunner application that is using the libpurple library for it's IM handling. Instantbird is currently at an 0.1.1 development stage. Not having any buddies on AIM or other IM services, I tested it for it's IRC functionality. What I found is it's front end lacks visual indicators of IRC connect status or the rooms one has joined. Development of the IRC / commands is non-existant, so all /joins must be done through the connect dialog. In a chat with one of the developers I learned the IRC support is a near target of their roadmap. The libpurple code base seemed solid to the extent I was able to evaluate the IRC function.

The advantage I perceive is libpurple works with both Linux and Windows builds which are both available on the Instantbird site.

Fri, 25/04/2008 - 01:54 — Anonymous

Don't care for IM either. Only for chat-logs.

At the moment I do prefer external IM clients for several reasons:

  1. An IM client does not need much screen-estate. A simple log, displayed in a list and a little text-input. That's all. Ideally the list only comes up when a new message has arrived or when I hover over the text-input. Now compare this to having a client, that requires me to run a full collaboration client in order to use it... This is maybe my main reason why I am against IM in Spicebird. It bloats.
  2. The current IM solutions are in development since years. And it took years to get them there, where they are today.

So, for me it comes down to two things, when thinking about IM and thinking about SB:

  1. The chat. This is often a "quickie" and therefore should be implemented like that: I want the IM to be integrated into my desktop environment and not the mail-client.
  2. The backlog of communication is sometimes interesting and important. And this is something, I sure want as part of a collaboration/messaging suite. A folder containing all the conversations I had with certain contacts. That would be nice. Searchable, printable, displayable as past events in the calendar, etc.

The Telepathy project seems very interesting. If you can implement it in a way, that I can read my conversation data from Spicebird as well as any other Telepathy based client I would say: Go for it, since that would mean Telepathy becomes available on Win32 ;-) and I still do not need to launch Spicebird in order to have a short IM or set my availability.

Wed, 30/04/2008 - 05:10 — Anonymous

Please don't

a) Please read http://coccinella.im/whytransportsmatter -- the guy has a lot of truth in his argument
b) I have a lot of experience with Telepathy and it is still not ready for prime time -- even more, considering that the cost of porting D-Bus to Windows will be non-trivial.

Wed, 07/05/2008 - 10:15 — prasad

Experience in Telepathy

btw... with you experience, it would be great if you can help us use Telepathy :)

Wed, 07/05/2008 - 10:14 — prasad

Nice Article

a) Thanks for the link to a good article on Instant Messaging. I do respect the authors opinions and that was the very reason we supported only XMPP in the 0.4 release. Even with Telepathy on board we would primarily be concentrating on XMPP.

b) Telepathy is a good thing to happen to IM. It is a very interesting project and the biggest reason why we are interested in it is the possibility to have a desktop-wide presence notification and integration with other IM clients in future. On Linux, it works great.

Telepathy is a pain on windows for the developer. The dbus, dbus-glib and telepathy-glib all have cost associated to get them work on windows. We are working on making them work and making it work on windows would mean a lot of value add atleast for users on Linux and probably OS X.

Thu, 24/04/2008 - 20:34 — Anonymous

Great app!

Would be great to see ICQ (and other IM protocol) integration! But as stated above other functionality is more important. And, of course, add-on compatibility!

Can't wait for next version..(it's 0.7, right?)

Mon, 21/04/2008 - 19:21 — Anonymous

Nice to see that the project

Nice to see that the project is still alive after the hiatus in blogging and all the spams left on the last comment.

Not sure that I'm worried about IM inclusion at this stage. More about getting the tasks/calendar/emails all working well together & being able to copy/paste & drag/drop between them.

Wed, 23/04/2008 - 14:07 — Anonymous

I concur completely

I too am happy that this project is still alive:) and would also suggest concentrating on functionality as stated above. Also calendering over network shares, exporting contacts, TB add-on compatibility (address book synchronization, etc).

When is the next update/grade coming?