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).
- An old regression where the new JavaScript logger used *nix style line breaks on all systems was fixed so Windows logs can be viewed in Notepad (bug 473).
- The conversation window can now be minimized with the ESC key (bug 441).
- Support for Windows CE was dropped.
- The themes preference pane now shows if themes are disabled or incompatible (bug 364).
- Multi-user chats now show an disconnected icon when offline or after leaving a room (bug 520).
- libpurple has been updated to 2.7.9 (from 2.7.3)
- Localized strings with a keyboard accelerator were not localized properly in the ‘Join Chat’ dialog (bug 655).
- For Developers:
- The menus are no longer created with a preprocessor directive and are now included via a XUL overlay (bug 622).
- A large number of updates have occurred in jsProtoHelper.jsm, used to simplify the creation of JavaScript protocols. They are now able to access account-specific preferences (bug 495), handle username splits (bug 647), join chat rooms (bug 648). In addition, some bugs were fixed to ignore the libpurple proxy structure (bug 649), automatically highlight messages containing the user’s nick in multi-user chats (bug 661), and some clean up occurred.
Next:
- Release 0.3 alpha 1.
- Florian is attending FOSDEM, where he’ll show Instantbird on Sunday, February 6th, 2011 in a talk about XULRunner Applications entitled “Instantbird and Conkeror — A view from the authors” (Axel Beckert will be discussing Conkeror).
- Research into setting up a non-profit organization.
By the way… Happy new year! Yeah… we are late 
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Very exciting! The two features I am most looking forward to in 0.3 (from the roadmap) are the systray icon for Windows and buddy icon support… Can you tell me what the status of these two features is?
Keep up the good work!
@Neil: The coding work on the systray icon and on buddy icons hasn’t really started, but will probably start soon.
Awesome! Thanks for letting me know, Instantbird looks really promising and I’m really excited about your plans for it. I’m a happy Adium user at home on OS X, but at work, I’ve struggled to find an IM client I can get on with, and I’ve tried most of them… Windows Live is just embarrassing. Pidgin is hampered by GTK+ and doesn’t behave like a Windows application. Digsby is full of spam (and spams your friends). Miranda is the best I’ve found so far, but all of its default behaviours are baffling and it has a ridiculous number of options to configure it, making it a bit of a mess.
Instantbird looks like the Windows (well, cross-platform) IM client I’ve been looking for for years now, as soon as 0.3 hits, I expect to become a regular user! (Without the systray icon I’ll just be closing it by accident all the time!).
@Neil: There is a version of Minimize to Tray available on the Mozilla Add-Ons website, but it has not yet been mirrored to our website, you can download it by right clicking and choosing “Save Link as…” on the newest version (0.8.4 currently) from this page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimizetotray-revived/versions/ That should keep you from closing it by mistake!
Great, thanks very much! As it happens, my office finally made the switch to Windows 7 last week and the tray is all of a sudden less of an issue :-)
I’d like it much better if there was an option to enable/disable the auto-hiding of the statusbar. I prefer to have my chat windows smaller, but the typing notification is only shown in the statusbar, which is hidden. Is there a work-around?
We’d actually really like to get rid of the status bar in general, we think there are better ways to show the information (i.e. typing notifications, number of characters left) then we’re currently using it.
The tab color should also change (to green I believe) when your buddy is typing a message to you. :)
I don’t know a way to always enable it off hand, but it should be possible with a userChrome.css hack.