Announces of new releases
We are happy to announce the release of Instantbird 0.2 beta 1. 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 release notes for a more detailed list.
You can download the beta and read the release notes from here.
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: https://addons.instantbird.org/.
And last, but not least, Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 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 release notes for more:
You can download the alpha and read the release notes from here.
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 this page 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.
After a few months without any release, we are glad to announce the release of Instantbird 0.1.3! 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).
This version contains several new features, but is also a stability/bugfix release.
You can download Instantbird 0.1.3 for Windows, Mac or Linux from this page. 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.
We produce nightly builds of Instantbird every day with buildbot. These builds can be downloaded from our server at http://ftp.instantbird.com/instantbird/nightly/latest-trunk/. 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:
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 http://hg.instantbird.org/. 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).
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!