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 Been Done?

• Dependency on libpurple has been eliminate: this included a big rewrite of the core service and how accounts and statuses were handled.
• Florian attended MozCamp and gave a talk on Instantbird.
• Participants in chat rooms are now only colored once they’ve participated.
• Mozilla has been updated from 7.0.1 to 9.0 beta 2.
• Many small back logged patches have been checked-in.

What’s Been Happening?

• Fixing fallout from the upgrade to Mozilla 9.0 beta 2.
• Work on integrating JS-XMPP.
• Work on integrating JS-IRC.
• Work on integrating SIPE (Microsoft Office Communicator protocol).

There’s been lots of big changes landing, and more to come! Although many of them are back end changes, they’ll pave the way for more visible features in the future.  We’ll try to do a better job of keeping our blog up to date with what’s going on.

As always, full chat logs and the EtherPad is available for each meeting; November 7 (chat logs, etherpad), November 14 (etherpad), and November 21 (chat logs, etherpad).  Note that no real discussion occurred on November 14th, just a summary of the week’s progress.

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:

• 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 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:

• Florian Quèze will be attending the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit this coming weekend
• Publicity for 1.1 release

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.)

In addition to several stability fixes and a dramatic reduction of resource consumption in some cases, this new release will make Twitter and IRC much more usable in Instantbird:

• On Twitter, it’s now possible from the context menu to retweet, to reply to a tweet (or simply double click on the tweet to start a reply). The context menu also lets you follow or unfollow the author of the tweet.
• Tab completion of usernames (starting with an @ character on twitter) or nicknames (in IRC channels) will also be very appreciated.

All these changes have been commonly requested, so no surprise here. But there’s one last feature I would like to talk about before offering you a download link: Instantbird 1.1 brings support for putting conversation on hold. This means you can now close conversation tabs without leaving the conversation, the conversation will sit at the top of the Contacts window until you reopen it or someone talks to you. While this may seem like a small change, it’s exceptionally useful for IRC users who tend to idle in lots of channels because they want to “be there just in case” but don’t interact much with the conversation.

Enough talk! Time to go download Instantbird 1.1 (or read the more detailed release notes).

As always, your feedback is welcome! And if you like Instantbird, maybe you will want to share the good news with your friends on Facebook or twitter?

Extensions are able to simply register themselves with the interruptions manager and they will automatically be notified if certain events happen, including when Instantbird wants to: get your attention (e.g. flash the task bar), open a new conversation, play a sound or show a message notification.

The API is really easy to use and we’ve created some example add-ons that use it!  We have created an an add-on to not allow the NickServ from IRC accounts to open (source), an update of NickServKiller.  Additionally there is an add-on to force auto-joined chats to be held on the buddy list (source), allowing you to give them your attention when you want to.  Another example of a great add-on is the Do Not Disturb add-on, which does not allow Instantbird to disturb the user while their status is set to Unavailable, really allowing you to concentrate on something more important (source).

There’s also a skeleton for an anti-spam add-on (an often requested feature!) that is just waiting to be finished!  Contact us on #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org if you’re interested in helping out.  And don’t worry, these extensions will be available on addons.instantbird.org soon!

We think this is a great addition for add-on developers working on Instantbird and can’t wait to see what exciting ideas people come up with!

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.

File transfer support: something we definitely want, but we also want to give a good user experience. Unfortunately most protocols do not transfer files efficiently or quickly (and many times they break when behind firewalls, etc.), thus we wish to offer an alternative to using the protocol file transfer before providing support for it: see bug 9.

Grouping buddies first by protocol then by group: this has been requested by multiple individuals, but we don’t feel it would fit well into Instantbird. Instantbird is a multi-protocol instant messaging client that aims to integrate all of your accounts together (therefore it doesn’t make sense to separate your accounts on the contact list).

For example, is your “Friend” not your friend whether it’s your MSN account, your AIM account or your Facebook account? Of course they still are! But perhaps you have different groups of friends on MSN than on AIM (maybe one is your online gaming buddies and one is your high school friends); well our suggestion is to move them to tags that make more sense (i.e. make an “Online Gaming Buddies” tag for all your MSN friends and a “School Friends” tag for all your AIM friends, in this example).

When asking people why they want this, the response usually is “that’s what <another IM client> does”. Well, ok but we wish that you take more of a ‘contact level view’ of people: Combine your contacts that are the same person and group them according to how you know them. (You can even put them in multiple tags, if someone is your online gaming buddy AND from school!)

If there’s a usecase that we’re not covering here, please let us know! (And don’t forget that Instantbird is fully extensible, so you could certainly write an extension to display the contacts grouped first by protocol if you really need that feature.)

Blocking buddies at the protocol level: unfortunately support for this isn’t great depending on the protocol, but libpurple does support it. We have two bugs on file; one is to block individual users and another to block all buddies not on your buddy list, which might not be supported by all protocols.

Blocking spam: although this is similar to blocking buddies, it’s different in that you do not wish to block ALL people not on your buddy list, but of course you still want to ignore the obvious spam messages! See bug 288 and bug 887 for two ideas on how to implement this.

Start with the operating system: many people expect an IM client to start with their operating system and although most operating systems provide a way to manually make a program start on boot, it would be convenient for Instantbird to provide an option to do this. This was requested in bug 376.

Facebook “Not Authorized” error: we added the solution to the FAQ.

Voice/video: we’d love to support voice/video too! But libpurple does not yet support voice/video on Windows or Mac, you can see bug 568 for some information on how we could support it in JavaScript protocols.

OTR (off the record messaging): private messaging is something we believe is useful, but it needs to be convenient and transparent to the users (after authentication, of course!). Encrypted chat is not a trivial task, especially when the protocols don’t support it, but there’s a library (called Off the Record) which handles this for us, we have a bug about integrating it: bug 877.

People want 64-bit Linux versions: we actually currently supply unsupported 64-bit builds, and there’s a bug about making them official (bug 395).

Instantbird interrupts you: if you receive a new IM window Instantbird rudely pops to the front, this is mostly noticeable when using another application as a fullscreen window (bug 926). Luckily for now, there’s currently an easy workaround: keep a conversation window opened and minimized, so that a new conversation appears in a tab of the existing window instead of a new window.

Being able to search/filter the contacts would be helpful: we agree! In fact we filed a bug about it: bug 631.

System tray issues:
Persist the tray icon: the system tray icon should stay visible even when the buddy list is restored, see bug 749.
Single click to restore the tray icon: an extension was created to support this and by default the next version of Instantbird will use single click on Linux and double click on Windows (see bug 870).
Expand the system tray context menu to change the status: this would be helpful and would match what was added to the jumplists for Windows 7, see bug 750 about any work on this.

We’ve heard that some protocols are having problems:
QQ does not work: we’ve had reports of QQ not connecting (QQ was actually dropped from Pidgin and spun off into a separate project (libqq), which we intend to include.
ICQ does not connect with default settings: we have begun to investigate this in bug 894, but it seems that SSL is broken for now.
Twitter has a variety of issues and needs more work, including: retweeting and replying to messages, direct messaging and showing a list of who you follow and who follows you.
A few suggestions to replace the libpurple MSN with msn-pecan: we actually have still not updated to the newest MSN code from libpurple 2.9.0 (as it was causing crashes for one of our developers), see bug 907 for the details.

People want more protocols:
IBM Lotus Sametime: we’ve actually added support for this in the nightly builds and it’ll be included in the next version!
Bonjour: this should be fairly easy to add on Mac, but Windows and Linux would require an extra library from Apple to support Bonjour. If you’re interested in adding it, see bug 944.
SIPE (Microsoft Office Communicator): one of our developers has started working on this in bug 976.
Skype: supporting Skype is non-trivial and requires Skype to be running in the background, use of (the non-free) SkypeKit or reverse engineering the protocol, see bug 563 for some ideas.

Lots of positive feedback! Including that Instantbird works great with screen readers! We’ve received TONS of other great feedback as well, this is just a summary of the popular feedback we’ve received.

Please remember that one of the team’s goals is to keep Instantbird as light as possible, and for that reason, we are trying to encourage the idea of creating add-ons for things that may not seem as a core necessity for the larger audience.

Development of Instantbird 1.1 is already well underway. We have a tentative roadmap for it. We definitely plan to release faster than we used to do before Instantbird 1.0. Our current target date for the next release is the end of September!