Category Archives: Development

Status Update: February 2011 – March 2011

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.

Continue reading →

Status Update: November 2010 – January 2011

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 →

IRC in Javascript – a contributor’s work

A short time after Instantbird 0.2 was released the js-proto branch was merged into the main development tree. This was the branch where the backend of Instantbird was prepared to support protocol plugins written entirely in Javascript. Not long after that, Patrick Cloke, an active contributor of the project, started working on an implementation of the IRC protocol plugin in Javascript.

Now he has written a long and detailed posting on his blog about the hows and whys, as well as the current status of his work. It’s spiced with lots of references to both Instantbird and specifications of the protocol. So if you’re interested in the technical aspects of Instantbird and how to extend Instantbird with a protocol plugin written in JS then you definitely should go and read it at his blog.

Status update

It’s been three weeks now since the last status update and here’s a short summary of things that have been done in the meantime.

Some contributors are getting more closely involved with the project lately. Subsequently some tasks, such as posting status updates, will occasionally be performed by people besides Florian, in fact this entry was written by Benedikt P.

Done:

  • Making the buddy list ready for the future: the buddy list backend mentioned in the last update has been finished, debugged and finally landed two weeks ago.
  • The Mozilla framework has supported CSS transitions for a while now and we decided to ditch our old animation code in favour of this state-of-the-art technology. Changing the display- and hide-animations on the buddy list is part of bug 504. Along with the change to the buddy list backend it greatly increased the speed when switching on the display of offline buddies. There should no longer be any noticeable delay, even when there are many buddies on the list. Continue reading →

Status update

It’s time again to give an overview of what we’ve been doing in the last few weeks and what we plan to do next.

Done:

  • The rewrite of the buddy list backend is going well. The new implementation, is almost usable (as long as you don’t need to add, remove or rename a contact). I can’t wait to land this in our nightly builds! (This will occur as soon as everything is re-implemented so there is no feature-loss). Bug 555 tracks this work.
  • I’ve spent some time analyzing the crash reports we have received after the libpurple update. I emailed the Pidgin developers mailing list to share my findings. The feedback received allowed us to fix a whole class of Windows-only crashes by applying a Glib fix. Continue reading →

Nightlies fixed and with upgraded libpurple

  • We have nightly builds again on all 3 OSes.
    • We have had issues on the physical machine that hosts our Windows and Linux compilation virtual machines. Even has been hard at work to get them back online as quickly as possible.
    • Additionally, our Windows builds failed with the obscure gklayout.lib : fatal error LNK1106: invalid file or disk full: cannot seek to 0x2000D93C error message. No, the disk wasn’t full, that would be too easy to understand… After a lot of wasted effort trying to figure out what had changed in the configuration of that machine or in the code, we finally got the solution on IRC from khuey and ted (thanks!): reboot with the /3GB switch to extend the address space.
  • The add-ons manager is usable again on nightlies. We got tired of bug 591801 and pushed for Instantbird a partial backout of the patch from bug 562797. (I haven’t attached it in the bug because this is clearly not a fix, but if other xulrunner application developers want to use it, it’s here. I know Daniel was very happy to have it for BlueGriffon.) Continue reading →

Nightly builds now based on mozilla-central

In late July, I started working on making Instantbird use the Mozilla 2.0 platform (which the recently released Firefox 4 betas are based on). This work, which started in a branch, has recently reached a point where we believe it could benefit from wider testing. The mozilla2 branch was merged Friday, September 10th, 2010.

This didn’t happen as smoothly as I would have hoped, but after 10 (!) bustage fixes, yesterday we were able to provide the first set of Instantbird nightly builds based on Mozilla 2.0. Our slowly growing community on #instantbird has jumped on them, and quickly reported a few significant issues. Thanks to their awesome help, those are fixed, and today we have a new set of nightly builds.

Additional help to test these new builds (Windows and Linux, Mac), will be greatly appreciated.

Known issues of this set of builds:

  • The ‘Show Logs’ menuitems don’t work (already fixed and will work tomorrow).
  • The Add-ons manager is broken. This is bug 591801.
  • The ‘Instantbird’ checkbox in the ‘Update’ pane of the ‘Advanced’ panel of the preference Window is disabled (already fixed and will work tomorrow).