Instantbird talk at FOSDEM

I (Florian) was in Brussels this week-end for the FOSDEM conference. As every time I went to FOSDEM, it was great to meet again several Mozillians I hadn’t seen for a long time.

I gave a talk early on Sunday morning about Instantbird. I would like to thank all the people who attended the session, asked interesting questions and gave great feedback at the end of the talk and during the rest of the day: thank you!

For those of you who would have liked to be there but couldn’t because of the time (too early, especially after the great dinner and bowling event Saturday evening) or location (not everybody lives in Europe!), I put the slides of my presentation online (and even wrote down what I said!).

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.

ICQ connection error

Recently users started to get an error (“Error: Unknown reason”) while attempting to connect to ICQ. This is being tracked in bug 582. This will occur using Instantbird 0.2 or 0.3a1pre nightly builds, if you are not seeing this error then the rest of this post can be disregarded.

Luckily there is an easy work around for now:

  1. Open the account manager (“Tools” > “Accounts”)
  2. Select your ICQ account and click “Properties”
  3. On the “Advanced Options” tab
    • change the “Server” to “login.icq.com”
    • deselect “Use SSL”
    • deselect “Use clientLogin”

Other third party instant messaging clients using one of the “old” login servers were also affected.

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 →