Vad som kommer i Adium 1.2

Adium 1.2, our next major goal, is going to be a crazy awesome release. In the last two days we've finished the initial merges of our Google Summer of Code 2007 students' efforts; it'll be some time and effort before the development trunk of Adium is stable and close to a release with all these incoming changes, but it'll be well worth it. The Summer of Code was a huge success:

• Andy Monitzer made many improvements to libpurple's XMPP/Jabber support, benefiting not only Adium, but also Pidgin and Finch.

• Erich Kreutzer modernized, fixed, and expanded Adium's Bonjour support, implementing file transfer in the process.

• Erik Beerepoot worked on multi-user conferencing in Adium, making good strides toward a more full-featured, shiny group chat experience.

• Matt Handley greatly expanded Adium's AppleScript support; it will now be possible to control Adium easily via AppleScript, paving the way to even more great user content and control customizability.

• Andre Cohen implemented snapping / detachable groups which let you detach groups from the contact list into free-floating windows

In addition, Adium 1.2 will utilize libpurple 2.2.0, which will bring a number of improvements, most notably the results of a Google Summer of Code project for Pidgin by Jeff Connelly which has added MySpaceIM support.

I understand that you don't support VoiceAndVideo yet, but what about chat? Can I chat over Skype in Adium?

No, not yet. The library that we use to support most protocols, libpurple, doesn't support Skype at all right now, not even for chat. Until it does Adium most likely won't, either.

Keep in mind that Skype is a proprietary, closed protocol, so it must be reverse-engineered before third-party clients like Pidgin and Adium can use it. Protocols like OSCAR (AIM) and MSN have already been reverse-engineered, but they're much older than Skype, and reverse-engineering is hard. It will take a long time. Please be patient.

There is an existing ticket for this request: #247. In that ticket, a significant bounty for Skype support has been offered by various users. If you want to take on the project, post a comment in the ticket and get hacking!

What about the Skype API?

We could use the Skype API, but you would still need to have Skype running. At that point, you may as well just use Skype.

We want to do it right, with first-class support for the protocol in Adium, whether it's by a reverse-engineered implementation (of sufficient quality) or by an official embeddable library published by Skype. The former hasn't happened yet and we don't foresee the latter happening either, and we don't accept piggybacking on the official client as a substitute, so until one of those two happens, Adium will not have support for Skype.

That said, if someone wants to expend their own time and resources and developing a Skype plugin using the Skype API, go for it. Once that code shows up, we would need to evaluate it based upon its particular limitations.

Adium does not currently have any Voice or Video (webcam) Chat functionality. The Adium team is aware that many users want to be able to audio/video chat.

Adium depends on libpurple for its protocol-level functionality, which means that information sent or received over (most) protocols must go through libpurple. We therefore can not offer audio/video capabilities until libpurple does; the Pidgin team is working on implementing such features, but there is not currently any ETA on when they will be available.

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As mentioned above, there is no support for Voice & Video with Adium at this time, but there are several developers working towards that goal. This work is extremely large in scope, and will take thousands of hours to complete, so it will take some time.

Including features is much more than copy and paste. aMSN is not built around a reusable library, so it would be harder to hook it up to the Adium UI. Also, it is completely written in TCL, while Adium uses C and Objective-C. Developers would need to convert all the code from one language to the other, or to find a way to interface between the two (like the Cocoa-Java bridge).

aMSN is probably a good place to look to know how the protocol works, but that code cannot be ported directly to Adium.

So I think we need to clarify things on the Voice/Video front. We (the Adium team) get asked a lot, sometimes daily, when Voice/Video are going to be implemented. I will answer this for you, right here, right now:

We do not know. It may never happen, it may be next year, it may be five years from now.

Now, take a deep breath. Let it out. Yes, I know it sucks, but it's the honest truth. Voice/Video is probably one of the hardest parts of IM. Especially in a multiprotocol IM client such as Adium. Now let me explain the requirements and why, and maybe that will shed some light on why you won't see this for a while.

• The first part to all of this is locating a library (or creating one) that sends and receives the information required. For multiple protocols this could be multiple libraries, or a single library that does them all. For those who don't know what a library is, think of it as the engine in a car, taking care of a lot of things that most people don't know about.

• There are a few libraries, but as of right now we don't have anyone implementing them in a way that we can use them, with the exception of our Summer of Code student working on Google Voice support.

• After we get a library, we have to hook it up. This was mentioned a bit above, but basically this would be like hooking up libgaim to talk to Adium, or Joscar. It depends on the library for how difficult it will be, along with the experience of the developer implementing it.

• QuickTime. Simply put, we need something to process the images, and QuickTime is it. QuickTime is also a pretty big API that none of us know much about as of yet (except Peter, who does not know IM protocols, and is therefore not suited to hook QuickTime up to anything).

• Someone to do all of this. Hooking up a library to talk to Adium, and then hooking that into QuickTime, and making sure it works with at least an iSight if not USB/Firewire cameras is a big task. One that nobody has really stepped up and said they wanted to do as of yet.

If you know someone who you think would be able to do all of this, and would like to work on Adium to get all of this going, please have them contact us. We'll eventually get to it otherwise, but it could be a long time.