Monthly Archives: November 2010

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.

  • If you ever tried to *emphasize* words in a plain text chat, be happy: we are displaying plain text formatting now, such as *bold*, /italics/, underline and |code| (bug 543).

  • We made conversation tabs look more native on Mac, taking advantage of a suggestion from Markus Stange:

    The old flat look:

    Cropped screenshot of the old look of the unified toolbar on Mac

    Now with a nice gradient in the title bar:

    Cropped screenshot of the new look of the unified toolbar on Mac

    If you have any other ideas how to make Instantbird more awesome, feel free to contact us or to file an enhancement request on our bugtracker.

  • Stuff for devs, stuff that matters: we’re using Services.jsm now and were able to reduce the number of lines used to get XPCOM services by 2/3.

  • Brainstorming: some brainstorming about completion of nicknames (among other things) happened on our IRC channel, summarized results and ideas can be found in the wiki.