Instantbird 1.0 release, 3 days later

Servers load

Instantbird 1.0 has been very quickly downloaded over ten thousand of times. In fact, it happened so fast (especially immediately after we have been featured on lifehacker) that our server couldn’t handle the load.

We have very quickly been able to mirror our main website on another server, which allowed people to keep discovering and downloading Instantbird 1.0, but we had to close the add-ons website for a while as the load it couldn’t handle was also putting down other services that we really needed to keep online, especially our bug database.

We have tried to re-open the add-ons website at a quieter time, but the server was unresponsive again within half an hour. This morning we tried to improve the website’s performance by adding some caching mechanism and reopened again (at a time when most Americans are asleep) for a try. Again it fall down.

Some people very kindly offered help and proposed to host the website on their server, but it’s difficult to trust someone we barely know to host a website that requires our SSL certificate.

As the add-ons website had been closed for almost 2 days already (sorry for the inconvenience!) and extensibility is a key differentiator of Instantbird compared to other similar IM clients, we decided that this situation couldn’t last any longer and we solved the problem by throwing money at it: we ordered a beefier server (Quad Core CPU, 16GB of RAM) and migrated the add-ons website to it as quickly as we could. The website reopened this afternoon, and our testing confirmed that the new server can easily handle the load, even with more visitors than we had when the previous server stopped responding. It’s ready for a lot more people coming! Don’t hesitate to tell your friends to try Instantbird :).

Feedback

We have received a massive amount of feedback since the release. Most was positive or extremely positive. We received lots of encouragements. We even received some love letters!

Some of the feedback showed there was some confusion, for example about how we are different from Pidgin (which we will be the subject of another post to clarify things). We also received constructive criticism, good bug reports. The most common request is an easy way to retweet or to reply to a tweet. We will work on that soon :). Tab completion of nick names is also commonly requested, but even though it’s clear we need to have this by default in the future, we can usually satisfy the reporter by pointing to the great (restartless!) Tab Complete add-on.

Updates

As no alarming issue has been reported in Instantbird 1.0 which is already widely used, we have decided to turn on major updates from Instantbird 0.2 to Instantbird 1.0.

Users of Instantbird 0.2 will be offered an update shortly with an update prompt looking like this:

Dialog offering a major update to Instantbird 1.0

Users of our 0.3pre nightly builds will be offered an update to a nightly build numbered 1.1a1pre in the next few days.

Conclusion

All in all, it’s been a great release and the last few days have been exciting (even though they were also exhausting). We look forward to continue hearing your feedback (and to actually act upon it!). Don’t hesitate to share Instantbird with your friends. Our servers are ready!

Instantbird 1.0 released in 11 locales!

The Instantbird team is pleased to announce a polished Instantbird 1.0, released today in 11 locales.

Instantbird logo

Instantbird is an extremely easy to use and highly extensible instant messaging client that aims to respect its users!

Building on the experience available via open-source software, Instantbird is able to harness the power of Pidgin (via its libpurple protocol library) and of Mozilla’s Firefox technology, to provide access to a wide variety of instant messaging networks, while providing an easy (and well known) extension platform. Although Instantbird is fully cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), we strive to present a native look-and-feel to the user interface.

Get Instantbird 1.0 now!

Instantbird 1.0 screenshot on Windows 7

Supported networks

First and foremost, Instantbird is an instant messaging client with a wide variety of supported networks, including:

  • AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
  • Facebook Chat
  • Google Talk
  • Twitter
  • Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger)
  • XMPP (Jabber)
  • Yahoo! Messenger

But also many others like: Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MySpaceIM, Netsoul, QQ, SIMPLE, Yahoo! JAPAN, and even more optionally available on the Instantbird Add-Ons website, such as Omegle and LJ Talk (LiveJournal).

Extensibility

We feel that a user should be able to make their instant messaging client their own: we feel Instantbird can be customized best by giving the user a simple and efficient user interface, and not attempting to include hundreds of bundled options, but allowing the user to customize via the powerful extensibility included in the Mozilla platform. All elements of Instantbird are customizable, from the message theme itself (we’ve built on the great message style format used in Adium) to the Instantbird theme, user interface and protocols. There are already over 250 add-ons available, here are some of our favorites:

  • Colorize — change a buddy’s color in a private conversation based on their name
  • Highlight — be notified of certain words in a chat as if they were your nickname
  • Tab Complete — tab completion of nicknames and commands
  • Reply to Nick — allows easy replying: double clicking a message in the chat inserts the sender’s name in the message input box
  • Show Nick — colors the nicknames in messages in multi-user chats
  • Vertical Tabs — too many conversations open? Move the tabs from horizontal to vertical!

Respecting users

As part of our belief in respecting our users, we give them an ad-free experience and respect their privacy by not collecting any information about them (Instantbird contacts our servers only when checking for updates, or in the unfortunate and uncommon event of a crash).

About us

The Instantbird team is a group of volunteers who are passionate about empowering instant messaging users by providing a stable, fun instant messenger. Read more about who we are and our core beliefs and values.

While Instantbird has received invaluable support from the Mozilla community at large, it hasn’t been funded in any way by the Mozilla Foundation. The company-quality infrastructure deployed to build and support Instantbird has been funded by the initial creators who strongly believe in the importance of this project. The increasingly fast growth of Instantbird’s user base leads us to believe the project could find some user-respecting revenue streams from which the project could become economically sustainable and empower the non-profit created for it to start hiring key contributors, following a model similar to what Mozilla has been doing with Firefox.

We’d like to thank all of our contributors and translators who have helped build Instantbird. In addition, we’d also like to thank our invaluable beta and nightly testers who provide timely bug reports and help track down regressions!

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to check out Instantbird, if you like it please share it with your friends; if you’re sharing it with your non-English-speaking friends, the website is now localized too! :) If you have questions feel free to contact us.

If you are writing about Instantbird and need a logo or are out of time to produce screenshots, we have image resources for you. If this is more convenient to you, this announcement is also available in a press release format.

Share Instantbird with your friends on twitter or Facebook!

Version number change

The current system

Since the beginning of the Instantbird project, we have released versions numbered 0.x.y.z:

  • 0. indicates that the initial goals of the project haven’t been reached yet.
  • x is the major version number. For example, Instantbird 0.2 was a major version for which we made very significant changes.
  • y is the minor version number, incremented when a release is very similar to the previous one, but with some new features. We released Instantbird 0.1.1, 0.1.2 and 0.1.3 which were minor new versions.
  • z was used only for emergency bugfix releases. For example we released 0.1.2.1 a day after 0.1.2 because of a very common crash on Windows with some MSN accounts (not those we used during our testing of course). We also released Instantbird 0.1.3.1 when Instantbird 0.1.3 was no longer able to connect to the ICQ network.

This version numbering scheme made a lot of sense when the project was initially a “XUL UI for Pidgin” and the goal was to reach “feature parity” with Pidgin for Instantbird 1.0. We have, however, supported features that Pidgin doesn’t have for a long time, thus defining the completion of Instantbird 1.0 as a comparison with Pidgin doesn’t make sense any more. Actually, our roadmap has stated for a long time already that the 1.0 goal is a “Simple, usable and extensible user interface.”

In addition to the 0.x.y.z version number, we are using “aN” and “bN” suffixes for alpha and beta releases (0.3b1 for example), so the version number in itself has nothing to do with stability (actually, our testers report that even our nightly builds are stable!). 0.<something> only means that we haven’t reached our initial goals, not that the version isn’t stable.

Received feedback

While linux enthusiasts are used to have great software with a not-yet-1.0 version number, on Windows a 0.* version number was a bit misleading and we received mostly 2 kinds of feedback about the version number:

  • “Wow, I can’t believe it’s so stable and featureful with such a low version number!” (user who has downloaded and tested it)
  • “Oh, it looks cool, but with such a low version number, it’s a pre-alpha, it can’t be stable, I’ll give it a try when it reaches 1.0.”

Disappointing, isn’t it? ;-)

User icons

Another very visible change between Instantbird 0.2 and 0.3 is the possibility to set a user icon and a display name.

screenshot of the contact list with a place holder icon

You will see a place holder icon at the top of the buddy list, just click it (this will open a file picker) to set an icon. The icon will be automatically resized and converted to fit the various size and format requirements of the IM networks you use.

Similarly, click the “Display name” place holder to edit it. This name will be visible in your contacts’ buddy lists (unfortunately this currently works only for MSN).

Here you go, your friends will now easily recognize you:

screenshot of the contact list with an icon and a display name

Conversation windows have also been changed to display your contacts’ icons and some more information (display name, status message, …):

conversation with an info bar showing the user icon

I can already hear some comments about how much space this new information bar takes (or wastes) in all conversation windows. Yes, this takes a lot of space, we know. People tend to use big or very big windows for chatting (sometimes even full screen!) but if you like the ability to chat in small windows, don’t worry, we love you too! Just resize the window and this information bar will shrink to ensure you still see the actual content of the conversation:

conversation with a smaller info bar

And for very small conversation windows, the bar will completely disappear, leaving only the strictly necessary user interface:

small conversation without the info bar

Better contact list

The contact list was identified as a weak area of Instantbird 0.2. It has been dramatically improved for Instantbird 0.3 which we plan to release next week.

Tags

Goodbye groups

Like most IM clients, Instantbird 0.2 had each contact placed in a group, leading users to organize contacts a bit like files are placed in folders on the disk.

While this seems ok at first, placing contacts inside groups doesn’t work well when thinking of the contact as a person. Don’t you have a friend (group ‘friend’) who is also a coworker (group ‘colleagues’)?

For this reason, with Instantbird 0.3 we replaced the notion of “Groups” with the notion of “Tags” throughout the user interface. While groups used to be containers for your contacts (it was possible to move a contact from one group into another), tags are additional data attached to the contact (you can add or remove tags on a contact, but no longer ‘move’ a contact) and thus a single contact can have multiple tags. To change the tags attached to a contact, use the “Tags…” context menu item of the contact; it shows a list of the existing tags with a check mark next to the tags attached to the selected contact. Checking/unchecking a tag in this list will attach/detach a tag from the contact.

Tags menu

Hidden tags

It’s pretty common when using several accounts of different protocols on a multi-protocol client for the first time to have contacts scattered around in lots of meaningless tags. These contacts are typically those that have never been moved before and are still in whatever the default group of the various previous clients were.

As moving each of these contacts out of these meaningless groups is not really an interesting task, and sometimes is even impossible (if the server doesn’t allow us to move it), we have designed a more efficient way to forget the annoyance caused by the pointless resulting tags: when hovering a tag in the contact list, you will see an [x] icon. Clicking it will hide the tag (after showing an explanation the first time).

Hide tag icon

It’s possible to manage the list of visible tags (to unhide a tag) from the “Visible tags…” context menu item.

Contacts which haven’t been associated with a visible tag will be displayed in a special “Other Contacts” tag, always at the bottom of the contact list.

Grouped contacts

If several networks are usable to IM the same person, you will no longer be annoyed by seeing that person listed several times in your contact list. Just drag and drop one of these contacts onto another and Instantbird will know they are both ways to contact the same person.

During future conversations, if your contact suddenly starts talking to you from a different network, the conversation will continue in the same tab. A system message will be displayed in the conversation to unobtrusively notify you of this change.

If you want to start talking to a different account of your contact, you can do so easily with a click on the protocol icon at the top right of the conversation UI:

Talk using a different network

When starting a conversation from the contact list, Instantbird will automatically select the best way to reach your contact, based on availability information and your preference with regard to the various ways to contact this person. You can change this preference by expanding a contact (with the down arrow icon) and then using drag and drop to reorder the accounts.

Expanded contact

Other noticable changes

  • The contact list is now sorted: both tags and contacts inside a tag appear alphabetically sorted.
  • Changes in the displayed information are smoothly animated, making them at the same time easier to understand and less interrupting.
  • Closing the contact list window, which is not needed all the time, will no longer close Instantbird. On Windows and Linux it will be minimized to the system tray (this behavior can be customized in the Preference dialog); on Mac it can be easily reopened from the menubar.

Introducing magic copy

The surprise and enthusiasm of a few people about the “magic copy” feature I mentioned briefly at the end of my previous post introducing time bubbles reminded me that we forgot to introduce this feature when it landed for Instantbird 0.2 as part of our implementation of the Adium message theme system.

We decided to use this theme system because it seemed nice overall and was already used by a few other clients as well. However there was something we really didn’t like: using a customized message theme could make copied data from the conversation really hard to read, to the point that it would be unsuitable for sending a quote via email.

As this may not be very clear yet, let me give an example:

Copying from a conversation without the 'magic copy' feature

This is the text we get when copying the selection to the clipboard and pasting it. This is without our “magic copy” feature of course.

I should also note that the Bubbles theme used for this screenshot is not the worst in this regards. I’ve seen in the description of some themes (not designed for Instantbird) that they were “clipboard friendly”, which indicates the theme author took this problem into account and probably had to make some trade-offs between the visual appearance and the usability of copied conversations.

As we were not satisfied with this situation (which either makes copying from the conversation poorly usable or restricts theme authors’ creativity), we developed a different system that instead of serializing the selected HTML attempts to detect which messages are selected, and to “prettyprint” them based on what Instantbird knows about the message, rather than what is visible and selected.

This is the result:

Same conversation copied with magic copy

If only a part of a single message was selected, the username and timestamp won’t be added to the copied strings, it will behave like a normal text copy:

Copying a part of a single message

As we detect which messages are selected and even know if each message was fully selected or only in part, we can nicely add an ellipsis when a message was cut:

Ellipsis are added where messages are cut

This even works when using multiple-selections (press Ctrl on Windows/Linux, and Command on Mac to do this):

Copying parts of multiple messages

A few technical details: the template used to serialize copied messages is both localizable and customizable from about:config, it’s also possible to completely turn off this feature in case it ever causes some trouble (look for the messenger.conversations.selections.* family of preferences in about:config).

This feature has been turned on by default in Instantbird for over a year and nobody complained about it. Actually, it’s one of the features that is barely noticed because it just works, but it is something that is really missed if using another IM client after using Instantbird for a while.

Instantbird 0.3 beta released in 10 locales!

I’m excited to announce the release of Instantbird 0.3 beta, the first localized preview of what we have been working on for months, available in 10 locales (Czech, German, English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Slovak and Ukrainian)!

In addition to the cool features already introduced in the previous two alpha releases (among which the Twitter support, tags, contacts merging, …), this beta brings significant appearance changes with user icons, an updated tab style, the improved default message theme, Aero glass effects on Windows and more awesome new features!

As Instantbird 0.3 is almost finished and already localized, thanks to the great work of our localizers who were eager to share Instantbird with people speaking their language, this beta release is a great opportunity to give Instantbird a try, play with it, and report bugs!

Download Instantbird 0.3 beta now!

We look forward to receiving your feedback to help us make the final Instantbird 0.3 release (planned for this month!) a piece of software you will want to share with all your friends!