A lot has been going on for Instantbird as the pace has been picking up as we approach the release of 0.3. Below we’ve highlighted some of the exciting new features that have become available since our last update. Some of these are currently available in 0.3 alpha 2, and the rest are available in the nightly builds! They’ll of course be included in 0.3 beta 1 (and the final release of 0.3).

Instantbird is participating in Google Summer of Code 2011 with one student project. Mozilla has been gracious enough to allow us to participate this year as part of their mentoring organization. The project includes an implementation of the XMPP protocol in JavaScript as an Instantbird extension. The XMPP implementation will be extensible to allow Instantbird extension developers to easily implement extra parts of the XMPP protocol beyond what will be included by default, some examples of this include collaborative editors and drawing boards. Details of the project proposal, as well as code and a blog are available to track this project.

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Done:

• Contact merging (bug 698).  If you talk to the same person on multiple IM networks you can now combine the buddies from each network into a single contact.  When opening a new chat the buddy that is online will be chosen automatically and the conversation window will automatically change to another buddy if they switch to a different IM network.
• Tags have begun to be implemented (to replace the groups concept in the current buddy list).  Tags can be hidden by clicking the “x” on the right side of the buddy list, all buddies from this tag will go into an “Other Contacts” tag automatically, which is shown at the bottom of the buddy list.
• The buddy list can now be closed on Mac without Instantbird quitting (bug 24).  It can be reopened from the Dock.
• Offline contacts vs. unknown contacts are now differentiated with icons.
• Instantbird has been upgraded from libpurple 2.7.9 to 2.7.11. Changes of note include a fix for adding buddies in MSN (see all changes at their change log).
• Dark variant of the “Simple” skin (bug 710).
• For Developers:
  • Extensions are now able to register commands (bug 118).
  • A general JavaScript socket object has been included (bug 673).
  • Instantbird 0.3a2pre nightlies are now based on the mozilla-2.0 branch instead of the mozilla-central trunk (commit).  This is the version of the Mozilla source that is used in Firefox 4.x.

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It’s been over two months from our last status update and a lot of changes and updates have occurred (from changeset to changeset). Below we list changes for the nightly trunk builds of Instantbird (0.3a1pre).

Done:

• Basic support for Twitter was added (bug 598).
  When the twitter account is connected, a timeline conversation automatically opens. If the conversation is closed by the user, it’s reopened automatically when new messages arrive. The user should disconnect the account from the account manager to prevent new messages from being displayed.
  There’s a “track” advanced option that allows to specify keywords to track. This is a comma separated list of keywords. Comma means OR, space inside a keyword means AND.
• The conversation UI has received a slight update:
  On Mac the splitter between the conversation and input boxes was reduced.
  For all operating systems, the status bar of the conversation window is now automatically hidden when the window is made small.
• After quite a lot of debate, the wording of the option for when to create a new conversation window was updated (bug 387). Continue reading →