Status Update: May 23, 2012

We’ve made quite a bit of improvements over the past few weeks. Although a lot of the changes are behind the scenes or fixing regressions, there are some exciting user facing changes, as detailed below! We’ve also been working with our Google Summer of Code 2012 student, wnayes, quite a bit to get him up to speed of how things work in Instantbird. He’s made great progress on understanding the code and has even fixed a bug (see the “top protocols” page, below)!

Landed Changes:

"Top Protocol" Page in the Account Wizard

Top Protocol” Page in the Account Wizard”

  • The account wizard now has a “top protocols” page to allow users to quickly set up accounts that are most applicable to them. This is localizable as different instant messaging networks are popular in different regions.
  • Tab Completion improvements:
    • Will no longer complete the same name multiple times.
    • You can now cycle backwards through the list of completions by holding shift while pressing tab.
    • All matching names can be cycled through now, although they are prioritized as:
      1. Names of people who have pinged you (i.e. said your name in the chat).
      2. Names of active participants.
      3. Names of inactive participants.
  • IRC changes

Google Summer of Code Status:

The past few weeks were the “bonding” period for Google Summer of Code students and their respective communities; actual work has started this week. As part of the “bonding” period, we asked wnayes to check out bug 1391: adding the “top protocols” page to the account wizard (see above for a screenshot!).  We thought this would be a great introduction to our tools (mostly Bugzilla and Mercurial), our workflow (requesting reviews and feedback, discussing why changes were made, etc.), some of the languages that we use (XUL, XBL, CSS, and JavaScript) and to some of the account manager code that he will be working on this summer! wnayes has done a great job and the changes are already in the nightly builds!

To follow along with what wnayes will be working on this summer, you can read his blog (RSS feed) and check out his user repository. Additionally, he’s posted some general information (his application, timeline and a series of links) that he’ll be updating as the summer continues. (And of course you can stop by our IRC channel, #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org, and say “Hi!”)

4 thoughts on “Status Update: May 23, 2012

  1. So I’ve just stumbled here while looking for a pidgin alternative. Nice GUI and cross platform.
    To be honest the thing I love most is your usage of tags, and being able to hide tags. Great idea.
    I look forward to seeing where it ends up!

    I’m also about to try linking in my preferences folder to dropbox and running it on both linux and windows as I’ve been doing with Pidgin, fingers crossed.

    • I’m glad you like it so far! We spent quite a bit of time on the tags, but there’s still more work to do! :)

      Linking your profiles for Linux and Windows should work (mostly) OK, as long as you don’t have any binary extensions.

  2. Please, implement Vocal conversations with XMPP and SIP!

    I can’t use Instantbird only cause of i need vocal conversations.

    Will you do it in Google summer code?

    • Jess,
      We’d certainly love to support voice and video in Instantbird! Unfortunately no one is currently working on this, but there’s a couple of bugs you could CC yourself if you’d like to get emails of when work starts: https://bugzilla.instantbird.org/show_bug.cgi?id=568 for Audio/Video support in general and https://bugzilla.instantbird.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769 for GTalk. There doesn’t seem to be one for SIP.

      We have a Google Summer of Code student working on Account Import this summer, hopefully next summer we’ll participate again; but we haven’t discussed projects (although students can propose their own as well!).

      Thanks for your feedback. :)