Category Archives: Community

Weekly Meeting: October 31, 2011

At the weekly meeting held on October 31, 2011 plans for Instantbird 1.2 were discussed as well as a summary of what’s happened since the 1.1 release. (Full chat logs are also available, as well as the Etherpad timelime.)

Weekly meetings are held every Monday at 4pm UTC (that’s 6pm for people in France, and 9am for people in San Francisco) in #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org.

What’s Happened Since the 1.1 Release:

  • Lots of patches have been reviewed and some new features are in (or soon to be in) the nightly builds.
    • Tab complete is now smart about case sensitivity.
    • You can now change your status from the tray icon.
    • You can now copy the link directly to a tweet.
  • Some major changes have been made to the repository to pave the way for large improvements. If you have the code checked out, you should update!

What’s Being Worked On:

Active participants are highlighted in color.
  • Only show colors of participants who have participated, allowing you to quickly see who’s active! This first patch will keep participants gray until they’ve talked once, look for it in a nightly soon!
  • Cleaning up and renaming of the interfaces to make them easier to work with. This is paving stone to making libpurple optional (and only loading protocols when they’re needed).
  • Integration work of the JavaScript IRC code into the Instantbird source has started (instead of using it as an extension).
  • Florian will be attending MozCamp Berlin, from November 12th to November 13th, and will be giving a talk on Instantbird, go say “Hi!” if you’ll be attending!
  • Lots of user interface (in particular, when using Twitter) “paper cut” bugs! Those annoying bugs that you can live with, but get in your way? Yeah, we don’t like those either.

 

Ways You Help Out:

There’s a few tasks that we could use help with, if you’re interested in any of these, please contact us.  (And if there’s something else you’re interested, let us know about that too!)

  • A QA/testing team would help to find regressions and bugs quickly
  • Help is needed in organizing the localization effort and keeping them up to date with information.
  • Someone to work on making the add-on experience more enjoyable would be appreciated.

Stop by at our next meeting on November 7, 2011 at 6:00 PM France time in #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org!  And as always, please file any bugs you see in our bug tracker.

Weekly Meeting: October 17, 2011

Weekly meetings are held every Monday at 4pm UTC (that’s 6pm for people in France, and 9am for people in San Francisco) in #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org.

The second weekly meeting discussed some final details for the 1.1 release, which happened on October 18, 2011!  Read the blog post about the release. In addition, some plans for Instantbird 1.2 were discussed.

Development Issues Discussed:

  • Instantbird 1.1:
    • SSL Issues with GTalk
    • Focus issues on the buddy list
    • Release candidates for all localization prepared
  • Instantbird 1.2:
    • Check in the backlog patches that have been reviewed
    • Update to Mozilla 8 or Mozilla 9
    • Integrate JavaScript protocols: clokep’s JS-IRC and XMPP from our GSoC  student
    • Strive toward making libpurple optional

Non-Development Issues Discussed:

Ways to Help Out:

  • A QA/testing team would help to find regressions and bugs quickly
  • Help is needed in organizing the localization effort and keeping them up to date with information

Stop by at our next meeting on October 24, 2011 at 6:00 PM France time.  Oh, and try out Instantbird 1.1 if you haven’t (and tell your friends)!

(Full chat logs are available, as well as the Etherpad timelime.)

Weekly Meeting: October 10, 2011

Weekly meetings are held every Monday at 4pm UTC (that’s 6pm for people in France, and 9am for people in San Francisco.)

The first weekly status meeting, which everyone is encouraged to attend, was held on #instantbird (irc.mozilla.org) and flo, clokep and aleth lead the discussions. (Full chat logs are available, as well as the Etherpad timelime.)

The meeting’s primary focus was about the pending 1.1 release (if you’re reading this before 1.1 goes gold, nightlies are available at http://ftp.instantbird.com/instantbird/nightly/latest-trunk/ and testing is always appreciated!)

Development Issues Discussed:

  • SSL issue. Fixed
  • Translations not yet 1.1 compliant. Fixed

Non-Development Issues Discussed:

  • Establishment of the non-profit foundation to support Instantbird
    • Specifically the creation of a bank account for funds and starting ideas to generate capital
    • We are still seeking suggestions for good web-based systems to let the non-profit receive donations (ideally with minimal transaction charges and must be accepting of most international currencies)
    • Thinking about ways to get more people to use Instantbird’s Amazon-affiliate code when making purchases
  • New WordPress-powered blog is launched, letting more Instantbird developers share in the blog’s upkeep and helping to expand its audience
  • Florian Quèze will be attending the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, so say hi if you are attending

If you read this full post, here is an extra sneak peak for you: Check out the full list of new features in 1.1! More details on them are on the way, that’s why this is just a sneak peek.

“Why should I switch from Pidgin?”

This is a question people keep asking us. With some variations (“Why should I switch from Adium?”), or sometimes without the question mark (“There’s nothing more than Pidgin”).

We are not competing…

I think people ask us this question because they perceive us as competing with Pidgin/Adium/[insert the name of your favorite open source IM client]. But there’s no good answer to that question, because we are not competing, here is why: Continue reading →

Instantbird 1.0 release, 3 days later

Servers load

Instantbird 1.0 has been very quickly downloaded over ten thousand of times. In fact, it happened so fast (especially immediately after we have been featured on lifehacker) that our server couldn’t handle the load.

We have very quickly been able to mirror our main website on another server, which allowed people to keep discovering and downloading Instantbird 1.0, but we had to close the add-ons website for a while as the load it couldn’t handle was also putting down other services that we really needed to keep online, especially our bug database.

We have tried to re-open the add-ons website at a quieter time, but the server was unresponsive again within half an hour. This morning we tried to improve the website’s performance by adding some caching mechanism and reopened again (at a time when most Americans are asleep) for a try. Again it fall down.

Some people very kindly offered help and proposed to host the website on their server, but it’s difficult to trust someone we barely know to host a website that requires our SSL certificate.

Continue reading →

Mailing list publicly readable

We used to handle most support requests received from the contact AT instantbird DOT org email address on a mailing list which was private. This was inefficient as we replied to the same questions over and over and people couldn’t benefit from old replies. New posts to the mailing list will now be publicly readable so that anybody in the community can help users with support requests (see our guidelines describing how we have answered emails up to now), answer questions, or just read the feedback we receive.

Anybody can subscribe to the Google group used: http://groups.google.com/group/instantbird-contact

We have also created another mailing list for all bug changes, so that people interested in knowing what’s changed in our bugzilla can get the information without requesting us to add them as globalwatchers on bugzilla. See http://groups.google.com/group/instantbird-bugs

Note: if you don’t have or don’t want to use a Google account, you can subscribe by email using the [Groupname]+subscribe@googlegroups.com address.