Up North

Like I guess no one missed Google released GTalk earlier this year. This caused quite a lot of noise, especially in the Jabber/XMPP community since they selected XMPP as protocol for this. It also lets you connect to GTalk with any available Jabber client, Jabber clients exists on a diversity of platforms.

One big obstacle for Jabber/XMPP is that it’s userbase consists of a minority of IM users compared to the other networks, like AIM. Yesterday it was announced that Google buys 5% of AOL (who are responsible for AIM) and that they will integrate their IM systems.

For a project such as GNOME, going with XMPP is the only viable option in my opinion. A project that claims to support and chose free and open standards shouldn’t block a pure Jabber/XMPP client to be the IM-client of choice. A few years back when discussions about including Gossip in GNOME, the main argument against it was that it didn’t support AIM (and to some extent MSN and ICQ).

If Google can choose XMPP for IM, shouldn’t GNOME be able to?

Cought some infection in the throat last Tuesday which got worse and worse and by Friday I was pretty much hammered and spent a lot of time in bed. During the weekend I was in a state of being indoors and mostly by the computer so I ended up hacking quite a bit…

As a result I also managed to push out three new releases yesterday. But first I’d like to comment on a new structure in Gossip.

Martyn Russell co-maintainer of Gossip
Martyn has been a really hard working contributor to Gossip and has lately ended up fixing lots of pieces that I have disabled during the largest code clean-up in Gossips history. He has also stayed on the project even though I’ve sometimes left his patches dangling unreviewed for a silly long time due to not having time to look at them, thanks for that!

Martyn joined the project and discontinued his own jabber client GNOME Jabber for the greater cause of creating one great client for the GNOME desktop. The result of our joint labour is now starting to show in that we now have a base for starting to add more features in a much cleaner way, firstly we’ll finish off Martyns huge work on the transport support based on some wet dreams I mocked up long ago. The result is really making transports in Gossip much better than in any other Jabber client I know.

So, to sum it up, keep rocking Martyn!

Blam 1.8.0
Blam 1.8.0 adds one of the features I really wanted in 2.0 with a patch from Heath Harrelson to add support for Atom feeds. This makes Blam useful for a large number of feeds only distributed in this format. Blam 1.8.0 also should work on newer Mono versions where the 1.6.x branch had some issues. As a result of these additions Blam now depends on the 1.1.x branch of Mono, but what do you say, you gain some, you loose some…

Loudmouth 0.90
I’ve been setting target for 1.0 of Loudmouth soon before switching to a new branch for doing some larger changes to help bind the library as well as adding full XMPP support like SASL and TLS. I also want to add a higher level layer that can optionally be used for those that don’t want to learn the entire XMPP protocol in order to connect and send a few messages.

Devhelp 0.10
This version of Devhelp mostly includes a bunch of fixes for newer Metacity, getting rid of focus stealing by the HTML widget. It also contains 9 updated translations as well as now also being translated into Hungarian and Kinyarwanda.

Finally the spring has arrived, this weekend where beautiful and we had a great run yesterday. I’m really looking forward to the orienteering season starting with competitions most weekends and exercises in the forest instead of running on the streets.

Had friends over for dinner on Friday and went to another friend for his 30th birthday on Saturday. Both where really nice and it felt good to meet people that you haven’t met for quite some time.

Gossip
So, thanks to Hadess I’ve been inpired to hack some on Gossip and started off by fixing the group chat support in HEAD. It now works a lot better than it ever did in 0.8. I also have a long list of things that I would like in Gossip, though they all take quite a bit of time each, but you have to start somewhere, right?

Next step will be to fix the subscription request system since it’s currently broken in HEAD. I also want to improve the first time wizard to make more sense and include less questions.