Instantbird Account Import Wizard

When evaluating a new messaging client, the common frustration of reconfiguring accounts and settings is difficult to avoid. To combat similar issues, the developers at Mozilla have implemented account import wizards in their Firefox and Thunderbird software packages. I propose creating an Account Import Wizard for the IM client Instantbird, which will provide users with a flexible way to import profile data from existing messaging client installations. [source]

Will is in contact with us via our IRC channel #instantbird (on irc.mozilla.org) during the community bonding period. We’d love for you to stop by and help welcome wnayes to our community. We’re extremely excited to have Will working with us this summer!

We’d like to thank Mozilla for letting us apply to Google Summer of Code with them!  You can see all of Mozilla’s accepted applications on the GSoC 2012 site.

We’ve again joined Mozilla as part of their application for Google Summer of Code. You can see some of our ideas on Mozilla’s wiki. (We should find out soon whether Instantbird will be doing any projects or not this year!)

What’s New?

• The JavaScript IRC implementation has landed! Many minor bugs were also fixed. The behavior is mostly the same as the old libpurple implementations, but there are differences. If you see issues, please file a bug! This will allow for better IRC support in the future.
• The tab completion algorithm has been made smarter:
• It now prefers the last person to have pinged you if there are multiple possible completions.
• Addressing multiple participants is now handled gracefully.
• There is now a reading position marker to show which messages arrived since you last viewed a conversation.
• Updated to Mozilla 11.
• A few crashers have been fixed.

What’s Coming Soon / Being Worked On?

• Minor IRC fixes: see known IRC bugs (in particular, better error handling).
• Upgrade to libpurple 2.10.3.
• Other Instantbird 1.2 blockers!

What’s this I hear about Thunderbird integrating instant messaging code from Instantbird?

You may have heard that instant messaging was recently added to Thunderbird. This work was done by our very own Florian Quèze! Don’t panic though! This doesn’t mean that Instantbird development is stopping, we strongly believe there is a place for both a standalone instant messenger and a more integrated approach with email. This is a mutually beneficial relationship between Instantbird and Thunderbird where we share code, benefit from more testing and get a set of new people — and ideas — involved in making instant messaging easier and more about how you — the user — wants it!

For those curious, approximately one-third of the Instantbird codebase is now in Thunderbird’s Daily and Earlybird builds.  Feel free to give it a try and file any bugs in Mozilla’s bugtracker. Currently it looks like this feature will likely appear in Thunderbird 15.

We’re getting close to the Instantbird 1.2 release and we think there’s been a lot of great improvements that will make it easier and more natural to instant message with your friends, family, co-workers and others!

What’s New?

• Tab completion is now smarter: “active” nicknames are now favored in completions and your own nickname is avoided in completions unless it’s the only match.
• The JavaScript XMPP protocol implementation developed by Varuna JAYASIRI for Google Summer of Code 2011 is now used for Facebook Chat and Google Talk accounts. It can’t yet fully replace the libpurple implementation until DNS SRV is supported.
• You can now scroll to the first unread message after opening a conversation that was on hold by pressing Alt+Page Up (you can also scroll to the top of the conversation by pressing Alt+Page Up again after that)!
• When opening a conversation on hold, the UI is now updated asynchronously if there are a lot of messages to restore. You may notice a progress bar has replaced the UI freeze we used to have in this situation.
• Conversations are now logged in a JSON format to allow more information than the old plaintext logs.
• You can now delete Twitter messages.
• Passwords are now stored in the Mozilla password manager! Previous saved passwords will be migrated to the password manager automatically, but the old saved password in the preference system is not yet deleted.  This will be handled in a future update.
• Buddy authorization requests have been rewritten to remove the (awful) modal dialogue!
• Mozilla was updated to 9.0.1 and libpurple was updated to 2.10.1.
• Various crashers have been fixed.
• Additionally, a lot of code reorganization has occurred for ongoing work of sharing code with Thunderbird.

What’s Coming Soon / Being Worked On?

• Our JavaScript implementation of IRC should be landing in the nightly builds soon, which should have feature parity to the libpurple implementation.  Please test this out!  You can find more information in bug 507.
• Integrate SIPE (bug 976).
• Add a reading position marker to quickly find the last read message in a conversation, bug 860.
• Upgrade to Mozilla 10.

What’s up with Instantbird 1.2?

We were hoping to release Instantbird 1.2 near the end of January, 2012.  Unfortunately there are a few blockers / regressions that have been found, causing us to be unable to release.  Everything slated as wanted or blocking Instantbird 1.2 can be seen on our Bugzilla.

• The l10n scripts need to be updated and translations need to be updated.
• Decide whether to drop QQ (we need to support showing captchas to keep it): bug 1021.
• Finish the JavaScript XMPP work (not all of these necessarily need to be done for Instantbird 1.2):
  • Handle setting a user’s icon.
  • Allow adding/removing tags from a buddy.
  • DNS SRV (not required for Facebook Chat or Google Talk): Mozilla bug 14328.
  • Receiving formatted messages (bug 1231).
  • Sending private messages to MUC participants.
  • MUC topics need to be supported.
• Currently a contact will disappear and not reappear when their name changes for some reason, bug 1178.
• Conversations should show the history in new windows, bug 958.
• All message styles (not just Bubbles) should support context messages, bug 1074.

Again, please accept our sincerest apologies for not providing any updates in the past couple of months about the progress we’ve made with Instantbird.  We’re really excited about Instantbird 1.2 and can hopefully get it out to everyone as soon as possible!  As always, Instantbird is made great by the community and we’d love to have more help in working on it!  If you have any ideas (or no ideas, but some free time!) stop by #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org and we can have some discussions or point you to ways to help you!

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?