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:
Now with a nice gradient in the title bar:
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.
Next:
- We’re planning to release Instantbird 0.2.0.1, which will include security and stability fixes for our current stable release. Additionally it will be available in a few additional locales that were finished soon after 0.2 was released.
- We’re planning to release a 0.3 alpha 1 version, which will include the changes mentioned above and some more visible changes.
- Carrying on the task of getting a new Mac build machine and switch Mac build from PPC/i386 to i386/x64.
- Setup a nonprofit organization to make money matters related to the project transparent and to be able to accept donations.