Blog@instantbird.org

Blog@instantbird.org http://blog.instantbird.org/ fr The blog of Instantbird's development Translations http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm14.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n14-translations.html We have been contacted by lots of individuals who volunteered to translate Instantbird into their native language and were eager to start working on it. As we were not ready to host the translations, we asked people to wait before starting their work on localized versions of Instantbird. As we plan to release the next beta of Instantbird 0.2 in several languages, we feel that now is a good time to start translating the UI of Instantbird. Please note that the development work is not finished yet, and that there will still be string changes before we are ready to release this next milestone. You will find information on the translation process on our wiki at <a href="http://wiki.instantbird.org/Instantbird:Translation">http://wiki.instantbird.org/Instantbird:Translation</a>. As usual, if you have any question, feel free to ask them in #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org or to contact us at contact AT instantbird DOT org. Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:07:11 +0100 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.2 beta 1 released! http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm13.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n13-instantbird-0-2-beta-1-released.html We are happy to announce the release of <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.2b1.html">Instantbird 0.2 beta 1</a>. The two most significant improvements in this release are new tabs in conversation windows and the preferences window. There's a lot more new stuff, read the <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.2b1.html">release notes</a> for a more detailed list. You can download the beta and read the release notes from <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.2b1.html">here</a>. Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:30:40 +0100 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 and addons! http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm12.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n12-instantbird-0-2-alpha-1-and-addons.html Today is a very special day for us. We have a double release to announce! First, the long awaited add-ons website is now ready for you to use. You will already find a lot of extensions on it since we took care of uploading more than 200 of them. Think about browsing the experimental add-ons, a lot of them are still marked as such. The add-ons website is at this address: <a href="https://addons.instantbird.org/">https://addons.instantbird.org/</a>. And last, but not least, <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.2a1.html">Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1</a> is now ready for you to try it! There's a lot of new interesting stuff in this one. Here are some of them, read the <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.2a1.html">release notes</a> for more:<ul> <li>It is <a href="a10-instantbird-0-2-feature-preview-localizability.html">ready to be localized</a> (and you can try an <a href="https://addons.instantbird.org/en-US/instantbird/addon/207">experimental French language pack</a>),</li> <li><a href="a11-instantbird-0-2-feature-preview-conversations-customization.html">Improved conversations</a>: you can change conversation styles, smiley themes are now handled.</li> <li>We implemented a 'magic' copy/paste feature that will allow you to have pretty quotes out of messages copied from Instantbird. Some bugs may still exist in this.</li> <li>As usual, we took great care of stability issues, so Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 is already more stable than 0.1.3.1 at this point, so don't hesitate to give it a try!</li> </ul> You can download the alpha and read the release notes from <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.2a1.html">here</a>. Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:01:38 +0200 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.2 feature preview: conversations customization http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm11.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n11-instantbird-0-2-feature-preview-conversations-customization.html In our <a href="http://wiki.instantbird.org/Instantbird:Roadmap">roadmap</a> we stated that for 0.2 we were going to improve the conversation window, and especially make it customizable. Let's show you an overview of what we did. <h2>Smileys</h2> People are used to see little images like <img src="smileys/sourire.png" alt=":-)" /> in conversations instead of the plain text version <code>:-)</code>. Testers of Instantbird 0.1.* have probably noticed that this feature was missing. No more. Instantbird 0.2 supports smileys, and has a theme system for them. <a href="http://wiki.instantbird.org/Instantbird:Creating_a_smiley_theme">Creating a new smiley theme</a> is easy: it is just a bunch of images and a file (JSON format) describing how to use them, bundled into an XPI file. <h2>Message styles</h2> Selecting a smiley theme is not enough for you to feel comfortable when looking at your conversations? Ok, we have more! We have borrowed the message style system of Adium to let you fully customize the way your conversations look. An image is worth a thousand words so... I'm gonna give you a <a href="http://screenshots.instantbird.org/message-styles-preview/">thousand of images</a>. Ok, not really a thousand, but we took a few hundreds of screenshots to show how Instantbird is doing with the hundreds of Adium message styles downloadable from <a href="http://adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5">adiumxtra.com</a>. The compatibility is not perfect because there are some <a href="http://wiki.instantbird.org/Instantbird:Message_Styles:Differences_with_Adium">differences in the way Instantbird and Adium handle themes</a>, and some Adium themes may use some webkit-specific features, but most themes look right. This theme system is very flexible, and quite easy to learn. The technologies used (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) are well known by web-developers and web-designers. If you are not happy with the existing themes, go ahead an create your own. And don't hesitate to let your creativity play with all the cool <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Firefox_3.5_for_developers">new developer features of Firefox 3.5</a>. <h2>Extensibility</h2> The eye candy is cool but... I'm a developer, I want to create extensions and I want to be able to interact with the conversations! Don't worry, we love you too. We added several new APIs for extension developers. It is now easy, for example, to change the way we filter incoming messages, modify the text before it is displayed (adding links for instance), and more coming! Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:17:06 +0200 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.2 Feature Preview: Localizability http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm10.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n10-instantbird-0-2-feature-preview-localizability.html As you may (or may not) know, we previously wrote that <a href="http://www.instantbird.org/about_translations.html">Instantbird 0.1.* was not localizable</a>. The reason evoked for this was the use of gettext by libpurple, which is not compatible with the way XUL applications are localized. I'm going to give more details about the issue, and explain how we solved it for Instantbird 0.2. <h2>Comparison of translation systems used by Mozilla and libpurple:</h2> Inside libpurple, localizable strings are just marked by <code>_("string")</code>. For example, you can find <a href="http://lxr.instantbird.org/instantbird/source/purple/libpurple/connection.c#549">this</a> in the code: <pre> description = _("Unknown error");</pre> During the compilation, _() is expanded by the C preprocessor to a call to a gettext function. Gettext tools can analyze the source code, find all strings enclosed in _() markers, and produce a translation template. <a href="http://developer.pidgin.im/l10n/pidgin.pot">This template</a> (a .pot file) is then handed to translators, who translate the strings and then provide a .po file for their language. The translation system for XUL applications is quite different, here are 2 significant differences: <ul> <li>localizable strings are not directly in the source code. The source code uses unique identifiers, and these identifiers are used to find the actual string in the locale files.</li> <li>the strings are spread across several localized files. Usually each window has its separate files, which makes it easy to decide at a later point that something will become an extension, and makes it easy to localize an extension like any other part of the application.</li> </ul> <h2>How do we deal with this in Instantbird?</h2> Obviously, we don't want Instantbird to use both of these localization systems, so one had to be removed. In Instantbird 0.1.*, we just removed gettext without replacing it. This means that the gettext _() macro was defined to something doing nothing, and the string used was just the one specified directly inside the source code. For Instantbird 0.2, this is no longer acceptable, and we worked on a way to simulate the action of gettext, that is, hiding the 2 differences I've just explained. Splitting the translation in different files wasn't very difficult. Actually, gettext has a concept of packages that makes it possible to split the translation of an application into several packages, the feature is just unused by libpurple. With a little bit of build system tweaking, I finally got a translation file for the core of libpurple, and a separate translation file for each protocol plugin. This was needed so that <a href="a9-instantbird-0-2-feature-preview-protocols-as-extensions.html">libpurple protocol plugins packaged as extensions</a> can be localized. Creating a unique identifier for each localizable string was a bit more work. The solution we have settled on is: <ul> <li>Take the original string and remove all string formatters (words starting with %), hexadecimal numbers (words starting with 0x) and more generally, all non alphanumeric characters.</li> <li>Remove all the whitespace in the remaining string, keep only the 7 first words, and convert to camel case.</li> </ul> At this point, we have an identifier for the original string, but it is not unique. Long strings that differ only at the end result in the same identifier, and strings that don't contain any real word ('%s:%s' for instance) all result in an empty string. To disambiguate in these cases, and only in these cases, we append the 8 first characters of the hexadecimal MD5 hash of the original string to the identifier. <h3>Now, how do we use this?</h3> We have a .properties file for libpurple and one for each protocol plugin. When libpurple is compiled for Instantbird, the gettext macros are modified to point to some of our code instead of the gettext library. Our code uses the en-US string to build the identifier, and attempts to find it in the .properties file. If it isn't found, it tries again with the identifier plus the 8 first characters of the MD5 hash of the string. If it still isn't found, then it returns the en-US string as a fallback (and emits a warning in debug builds). <h3>How do we make the .properties files for libpurple?</h3> I wrote <a href="https://hg.instantbird.org/instantbird/file/b288fc7228e7/tools/l10n/convert-purple-po-files-to-properties-files.py">a python script</a> that generates automatically the appropriate .properties files for the en-US language from the source code of libpurple. Additionnaly, it uses the various .po files of Pidgin to produce files that can be used as a base for localizing this part of Instantbird. <h3>Does this mean I can start translating Instantbird into my own language?</h3> No, not yet, but very soon! Once we are ready to accept contributions from translators, we will ask translators who volunteer to localize Instantbird to contact us so that we can provide them with these generated files. An alpha build of Instantbird 0.2 will be available soon. We will provide an experimental French translation of this build (most people in our team are French, so French was the logical choice for testing all of this ourselves). Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:04:15 +0200 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.2 feature preview: protocols as extensions http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm9.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n9-instantbird-0-2-feature-preview-protocols-as-extensions.html One of the features we wanted in Instantbird 0.2 was the ability to install libpurple protocol plugins like any other addon. I'm happy to report that this is now possible with current <a href="http://ftp.instantbird.com/instantbird/nightly/latest-trunk/">nightly builds</a>. To demonstrate this feature, I compiled the <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/">Facebook Chat libpurple protocol plugin</a>. The result is an <a href="http://blog.instantbird.org/files/facebook.xpi">installable xpi file</a> of about 200kB, that people can try with nightly builds of Instantbird. This file contains a binary module compiled for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (universal), produced by copying the code from <a href="http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/pidgin-facebookchat-source-1.47.tar.bz2">here</a> into the Instantbird source tree. This is the quickest way I found to build it, we will need to figure out a better (without having to download and build the whole Instantbird source code) way later. This is <a href="http://blog.instantbird.org/files/add-facebook-chat-prpl.patch">the exact patch I used</a> to build it. The xpi file also contains a set of icons and a locale file. I will explain in another post how we replaced the usage of <code>gettext</code> in libpurple by a way to get localized strings from regular .properties files. Feel free to try this facebook chat addons. I don't know how stable it is, but I've used it for a few days already and haven't encountered any serious issue. If this turns out to be crashy for you, don't hesitate to send us crash reports, I uploaded the symbols to our symbol servers, so the reports should provide useful information. I have other nearly-ready Instantbird 0.2 features to introduce in more details later, including: localization, emoticon themes, message styles (like Adium), ... Next time: how localization works with Instantbird and how we replaced <code>gettext</code>. Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:45:13 +0200 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.1.3.1 released http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm8.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n8-instantbird-0-1-3-1-released.html We have just released a small update to Instantbird 0.1.3. This will fix the connection issue with ICQ that appeared a little more than two weeks ago (sorry it took so long!) and improve the stability. You can download this new 0.1.3.1 release from <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.1.3.1.html">this page</a> or just click on the 'Check for updates' menu to download only a small update file. We are going to post a status update about the progress of the development of the 0.2 version soon. Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:23:06 +0100 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.1.3 released! http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm7.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n7-instantbird-0-1-3-released.html After a few months without any release, we are glad to announce the release of <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.1.3.html">Instantbird 0.1.3</a>! This should be the last minor release before Instantbird 0.2 on which the work has already started (we are currently working on localization stuff). <h2>What's new?</h2> This version contains several new features, but is also a stability/bugfix release. <ul> <li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">New features:<ul> <li>Proxy support: you can now use HTTP and Socks proxies.</li> <li>Typing notifications: you can know when the person you are talking to is typing.</li> <li>Automatic reconnection: when a non fatal connection error occurs (e.g. network failure), the account is automatically reconnected after a few seconds.</li> <li>Idleness: servers are notified when you are idle so that your status is changed.</li> <li>Better handling of chat rooms: the topic of the room and the list of participants are displayed, IRC commands work.</li> <li>Findbar: it is now easy to search in a conversation, with a findbar similar to the Firefox one. A notable difference is that it searches backwards by default, so that the most recent matching messages are found first.</li> <li>Universal build: the Mac binary now also works on PPC Macs.</li> </ul></li> <li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">Updated: Instantbird 0.1.3 is based on libpurple 2.5.2 and Mozilla 1.9.1b2.</li> <li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">Improved stability: we used the crash reports that we got from the 0.1.2 release and nightly builds to fix bugs that resulted in crashes.</li> </ul> You can download Instantbird 0.1.3 for Windows, Mac or Linux from <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.1.3.html">this page</a>. Of course you can also download the source code. We look forward to get your feedback on this release. You can comment on this post or join us on IRC in #instantbird. Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:09:57 +0100 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Nightly builds available http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm6.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n6-nightly-builds-available.html <h2>Nightly builds</h2> We produce nightly builds of Instantbird every day with buildbot. These builds can be downloaded from our server at <a href="http://ftp.instantbird.com/instantbird/nightly/latest-trunk/">http://ftp.instantbird.com/instantbird/nightly/latest-trunk/</a>. Please note that these builds are available for testing purpose only, and are totally untested before we put them online. Use them at your own risks. If you want to help us with testing, there is no need to download and install a new build from the server everyday, the application will automatically propose updates. To ensure that users won't confuse nightly unstable builds with releases, we use a different set of icons for the nightlies. The nightly icon is: <img src="http://www.instantbird.com/images/nightly.png" alt="Nightly logo"/> <h2>What's new?</h2> It has already been a few months since the last release, so I guess it's a good time for a quick status update. Just after the 0.1.2 release, we switched from subversion to mercurial for the versioning of our source code. Our mercurial repository is publicly available at <a href="http://hg.instantbird.org/">http://hg.instantbird.org/</a>. At the same time, for the Mozilla code we use, we switched from the CVS trunk (1.9.0.x) to mozilla-central and we are now using a build system which is very similar to the comm-central one. In fact, it's a copy of it with very small modifications. Thanks to the people who helped us for the transition and to the people who worked on the comm-central build system. There are also some new features: There's a findbar in the conversation window (Ctrl/Cmd + F to open it), commands (/me, /topic, etc...) work in conversations, the list of chat room participants is displayed (for example, in IRC channels), typing notifications work, idleness (becoming idle based on the inactivity time) works, status changes are displayed in conversations, it's possible to force a check for update, ... We also spent time on code cleanup (debug logging for example) and stability improvements (taking into account the data from the crash reporting system). <h2>What's next?</h2> We plan to do another minor release soon, and after that, for the 0.2 release, the focus will be on extensibility. On a side note, this project has been public for one year, Instantbird 0.1 was released on October 18th, 2007. Even if we hoped to do more, it's been a great year for the project! Sat, 18 Oct 2008 16:23:42 +0200 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.1.2 crashing with some MSN accounts http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm5.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n5-instantbird-0-1-2-crashing-with-some-msn-accounts.html We have just released Instantbird 0.1.2.1 to fix a crash that a lot of people experienced when trying to connect their MSN account on Windows. Unfortunately, this issue wasn't detected during our testing prior to the release and we are really sorry about it. If you have Instantbird 0.1.2 on Windows (and if it doesn't crash at startup because of an automatic connection to your MSN account), you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. You can get the full version of Instantbird 0.1.2.1 from the <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download.html">download</a> page. We would like to thank our users who sent crash reports and useful feedback, and congrats to the people who worked on the crash reporting and automated update tools. Being able to notice, locate and fix quickly such bugs with a small (21kB) update is just amazing! Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:07:08 +0200 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.1.2 released! http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm4.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n4-instantbird-0-1-2-released.html After a few months without any release, we are glad to announce the release of <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.1.2.html">Instantbird 0.1.2</a>! <h2>What's new?</h2> This version is more a stability/bugfix release than a feature release. <ul> <li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">Updated: Instantbird 0.1.2 is now based on libpurple 2.4.3 and Mozilla 1.9.0.1.</li> <li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">Improved stability: we fixed the outstanding bugs that resulted in crashes. We also turned on breakpad to get more data on crashes.</li> <li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">Detailed tooltips: the tooltips of the buddy list now contain detailed information.</li> <li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">Under the hood: On this release we spent a lot of time on the build system. Instantbird can now be built like any other Mozilla application. It doesn't require to build dependencies separately any more. This results in smaller downloads (we package only the files that are really needed) and for developers it will now be easy to play with our code.</li> </ul> You can download Instantbird 0.1.2 for Windows, Linux or Mac from <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download-0.1.2.html">this page</a>. Of course you can also download the source code. We look forward to get your feedback on this release. You can comment on this post or join us on IRC in #instantbird. Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:19:35 +0200 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.1.1 released! http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm3.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n3-instantbird-0-1-1-released.html We are glad to announce the release of <a href="http://www.instantbird.com/download.html" title="Download Instantbird 0.1.1">Instantbird 0.1.1</a>. This release is mostly a bug fix release. We've been impressed by the success of the 0.1 release and thought it would be nice to deliver a more stable version for the users we already have before making big changes for version 0.2. The things we focused on for this release are: <ul> <li>Improved stability: we fixed the outstanding bugs that resulted in crashes.</li> <li>Proper handling of non-ASCII characters. Instantbird now uses UTF-8 for all strings.</li> <li>Usability improvements. We fixed bugs that didn't require much of our time and will significantly improve the user experience. For examples: aliases in the buddy list, linkification in the chat window, ... We also removed some common annoyances in the UI.</li> <li>IRC Chats. In order to build a community, we thought it was critical to provide some way for users and testers to talk in a public place and not only send us private messages. There is now in the "File" menu a "Join Chat" item which will allow users and future contributors to join us in irc.mozilla.org#instantbird</li> </ul> We look forward to get your feedback on this release. You can comment in this blog or join us on IRC. We would like to thank the early testers and users of the 0.1 release who provided some great feedback and helped us make Instantbird better! Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:24:34 +0100 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird 0.1, one month and nearly 80000 downloads http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm2.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n2-instantbird-0-1-one-month-and-nearly-80000-downloads.html We released Instantbird 0.1 about a month ago. It has been downloaded more than 1600 times the first day, about 80000 downloads from our servers (the exact number right now is 79497), and we know some unofficial mirrors have been put online. Of course, we know that 80000 downloads doesn't mean 80000 users, but we are really happy to see that so many people were interested by the project enough to go ahead and download it. Thank you! Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:22:06 +0100 Florian <florian@instantbird.org> Instantbird has a blog! http://blog.instantbird.org/nocomm1.html http://blog.instantbird.org/n1-instantbird-has-a-blog.html Many of you asked us if we could put online a blog with updates about the development of Instantbird. So here it is! Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:20:19 +0100 Florian <florian@instantbird.org>