Are you talking to me?

Ayttm-0.6.3 has been released, mainly to break the monotony of absolutely _no_ updates since the last few months. This release contains some bug fixes and one very important change. Here is a short summary:

• Yahoo support is now based on the libyahoo2 library. It always was, but earlier we had a copy of libyahoo2 in the source tree. Not anymore. The important thing that changes here is that you'll need the development libraries of libyahoo2 to be able to build ayttm now.
• Fixes to spell check code
• Some code clean up in the module loading section

You can always check the complete ChangeLog to find out the specifics of each of those changes.

Here is another release of ayttm with a bunch of improvements, especially to the UI code:

• Reworked chat window look and also under the hood. The code is much cleaner as a result
• Fixed some linker related bugs raised in Fedora and Debian bug trackers
• Clean up the chat notifications (Buddy arrive,, leave, etc.)
• IRC kick. Go kick your buddy now ;)
• expat security fixes (CVE-2009-3560 CVE-2009-3720)
• Yahoo Buzz
• Yahoo address book fixes
• Fixed multiple buffer overflows and crashes in MSN and Yahoo
• Enchat/hunspell support for spell check. This replaces aspell

Here is the complete Changelog of updates since the last release.

Ayttm now has a wiki! The wiki will be used for documenting various things about ayttm, from the application architecture to the user manual. The user manual is currently a bunch of unwieldy pages in the website. I'm planning to get all of that into the wiki to make things more manageable.

The primary motivation to do this is that I have to provide a link to the application architecture documentation for the Ayttm workout at FOSS.in. I have already written a first draft of the application architecture as well as an article on writing Service plugins, the latter being rewritten from $(topsrcdir)/doc/eb-service-writing-howto.txt.

This release brings in a number of bug fixes along with a few features:

• Fix a number of MSN related crashes
• Personal status messages support for MSN
• Fix a Yahoo authentication bug
• Yahoo File Transfer
• MSN Invisible login preference finally works again
• Fix the "Check new release" button
• Fix date/time bugs in the tool tips
• Notifications in chat windows
• Autotranslate is fixed. Uses Google Translate now
• SMTP and Livejournal should be working again

See the complete Changelog or download the source from the files section.

FOSS.IN workouts are a good way to get a lot of real work done. The FOSS.IN/2009 Call for Participation is out and we're putting in a workout proposal this year too.

We did a submission last year but it was not accepted. Philip then arranged for a BoF at the event, where he helped to build ayttm on a Ubuntu box and I tried getting async DNS lookups going. Since then, we have managed to take care of a lot of last years wish list with 0.6.0. There are still some remaining and based on that and a few new ones, here's a list of TODOs for the ayttm workout for FOSS.IN/2009.

1. Revive the Windows port. This should be a little easier than before due the fact that a lot of networking code has now been modularized into a single library
2. MSN File Transfer
3. A nice clean smiley set in MNG/PNG format
4. Icons
5. Update translations
6. Implement name completion in chat rooms
7. Package ayttm for $MY_FAVOURITE_DISTRO
8. Port ayttm to $MY_FAVOURITE_OS

Prerequisites

0. Register as a delegate at FOSS.IN/2009

Other than that, the most important prerequisite to participating in this session is to have a prior idea of what you're planning to do. A prior study of the code base would only make things easier. Other prerequisites vary for the tasks and can be mapped by serial number:

1. Knowledge of build tools for Windows. Programming: C/C++, gtk2, glib2
2. C/C++, wireshark dump/tcpdump analysis
3. An eye for design. Knowledge of FOSS design tools (gimp, inkscape, etc.)
4. An eye for design. Knowledge of FOSS design tools (gimp, inkscape, etc.)
5. Should know how to write/update translations
6. C/C++, gtk2, glib2
7. Packaging guidlines for $MY_FAVOURITE_DISTRO. Basic knowledge of building autotools based applications
8. Knowledge of build tool chain for $MY_FAVOURITE_OS

Further updates to this workout proposal will come either as updates to this post or in the comments, so bookmark it or subscribe to our feed to keep track.

Ayttm has moved to git now! You can browse the source code online or clone the repository as shown in the developer instructions.

This is a heads-up for those who are building ayttm 0.6.0 with the --enable-posix-dlopen to avoid using libtool unnecessarily. There was a bug due to which the msn module would not load. I have fixed that in the latest cvs update (0.6.0-1). Please pull in that fix if you need support for msn and are getting a module load failure message on ayttm start up.

For those who don't really mind libtool and have not used the --enable-posix-dlopen option, this will have no effect on you.

This is by far the biggest release in that last two years because of the sheer number of components that have been touched. Here's an overview of the things that have changed in this release:

• MSN Protocol updated to MSNP15
• Yahoo protocol updated to YMSG16
• Fixes to jabber. We now have service discovery and GMail notifications if you want it. The option is in your account preferences
• Spellcheck is now provided by aspell by default. Pspell is long dead and we have finally let go
• Overhaul of the networking code. We now have a transparent connection layer which takes care of SSL, proxies, etc. for the protocols. What's more, it's multi-threaded, and hence lives life on the edge. The good thing is that the interface will no longer hang when you're looking up a host name or connecting to your proxy.
• Improvements in support of character encodings other than UTF-8. Ayttm now tries to convert incoming data into the correct encoding than crashing or whining. Look up the "encodings" option in your ~/.ayttm/prefs if you want to tweak its behaviour
• Ayttm now uses stock icons wherever possible. This has resulted in a fair decrease in binary size (do I see Barry Kauler smiling? ;) ) and also makes the interface a little prettier.
• Various fixes to the status window and chat window UI
• Removed deprecated AIM-TOC, ICQ-TOC and ICQ modules from the package. You can still get them out of CVS, but I'll be removing them from there too pretty soon.

Here's the full Changelog for a full list of things that changed during this release.

Some features will be seen as missing, especially in the MSN protocol. The reason for this is that the MSN protocol module has been written from scratch now and hence a number of features such as File Transfer, netmeeting integration, etc. are missing. Those things will come in when they're ready.

The livejournal and smtp plugins have not yet been updated to work with the new networking subsystem and will thus fail to work and crash. They will be addressed in the next update.

A lot more has gone into ayttm since my last post here. Here's a quick look at things that have improved:

• YMSG16 contact management is working now. One can add, remove and modify users and groups on the new yahoo protocol
• MSNP15 has been implemented! We can now log in and chat using MSN protocol v15 using ayttm. This should work for all those users who were no longer able to login to their MSN accounts using ayttm
• A lot of UI fixes by Piotr. He now has a direct commit access to ayttm and has been making good use of it :)

The next few days should see the following implemented:

• Contact management for MSN. This sort of sucks because it needs to be implemented using SOAP -- and I hate it. It is too much data for a really small amount of information. I guess the official messenger needs all that information
• Make all dialogs use stock icons for Accept/Deny or Ok/Cancel buttons so that we can get rid of some ugly pixmaps
• Some buddy state/status related fixes and improvements

So stay tuned, we're not dead yet :)

Ayttm-0.5.0-111 has been released! There have been a number of improvements under the hood.

Changes:

• Users can specify a different character encoding for each of their chat rooms/windows. There is also a new preference added called "encodings", which can be used to specify the list of encodings to be used to decode incoming data in case it is not in UTF-8.
• Pong for the IRC ping. This enables ayttm to be used with servers that require a pong to keep a connection alive
• Conform to Debians Lintian standards
• Multiple fixes to irc
• Multiple fixes to jabber
• Fixed multiple UI related issues
• Lots of bug fixes
• A new contributor in the form of Piotr Stefaniak :)
• Conform to Fedora packaging standards by providing a workaround for libtool to enable use of *.so for dynamically loading modules. We should have a Fedora package soon!

View the full ChangeLog

Report bugs here

Coming up in the next release:

• Support for the new yahoo messenger protocol. Our messenger has not been disabled yet since we use a very old protocol. The transition to the new protocol will happen before August 15th
• Support for the new MSN protocol
• Better connectivity support under the hood

Wishlist:

• Hunspell support
• Prettier smileys and icons