We’ve made quite a bit of improvements over the past few weeks. Although a lot of the changes are behind the scenes or fixing regressions, there are some exciting user facing changes, as detailed below! We’ve also been working with our Google Summer of Code 2012 student, wnayes, quite a bit to get him up to speed of how things work in Instantbird. He’s made great progress on understanding the code and has even fixed a bug (see the “top protocols” page, below)!
Landed Changes:
“Top Protocol” Page in the Account Wizard”
- The account wizard now has a “top protocols” page to allow users to quickly set up accounts that are most applicable to them. This is localizable as different instant messaging networks are popular in different regions.
- Tab Completion improvements:
- Will no longer complete the same name multiple times.
- You can now cycle backwards through the list of completions by holding shift while pressing tab.
- All matching names can be cycled through now, although they are
prioritized
as:
- Names of people who have pinged you (i.e. said your name in the chat).
- Names of active participants.
- Names of inactive participants.
- IRC changes
- IRC contacts (yes, you can add IRC nicks to your contacts list!) now have tooltips which show the results of a WHOIS command.
- Better support for tracking if a nick is online/away/offline.
- The topic UI now reflects whether you have permission to edit it.
- Many bugs were fixed and error messages were added as fallout to the landing of JavaScript-IRC. Thanks for filing bugs!
Google Summer of Code Status:
The past few weeks were the “bonding” period for Google Summer of Code students and their respective communities; actual work has started this week. As part of the “bonding” period, we asked wnayes to check out bug 1391: adding the “top protocols” page to the account wizard (see above for a screenshot!). We thought this would be a great introduction to our tools (mostly Bugzilla and Mercurial), our workflow (requesting reviews and feedback, discussing why changes were made, etc.), some of the languages that we use (XUL, XBL, CSS, and JavaScript) and to some of the account manager code that he will be working on this summer! wnayes has done a great job and the changes are already in the nightly builds!
To follow along with what wnayes will be working on this summer, you can read his blog (RSS feed) and check out his user repository. Additionally, he’s posted some general information (his application, timeline and a series of links) that he’ll be updating as the summer continues. (And of course you can stop by our IRC channel, #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org, and say “Hi!”)