I didn't expect this release to be a big deal... but it turned into one, at least for certain cohorts.

Adium X 0.88 is a Universal binary, running natively on PPC Macs with OS X 10.2.7 or later and Intel Macs running OS X 10.4.0 or later. That's a Big Deal for you early adopters out there, since Macworld's recent benchmarking indicates that native applications may have as much as a 100% speed advantage over applications running in Rosetta.

We've fixed one of our longest-standing bugs ([#31]), a buglet rooted in Gaim code which was preventing MSN buddy icons (avatars) from updating properly. Autoconnection when waking from sleep, another longtime headache for certain users, should also be improved (and other common complaints about connectivity -- particularly global status changes -- are already fixed on the still-progressing-awesomely Adium 1.0 codebase). A number of other crashes and aesthetic bugs have been corrected, too; check out the Version History for all the details.

Fnally, Adium 0.88 welcomes our friends down under to the community with an Australian English localization.

Interested in getting involved with Adium? Please take a look at the Support & Development tab and browse the ticket system; we're always happy to review patches fixing bugs and implementing features (both those which have been requested and those which are original enhancement ideas). There's also the donate link if you're so inclined, and if you're looking for fantastic hosting please don't forget our generous sponsors, Network Redux (our website host), CacheFly (our download host), and Penguin Militia Networks (our Trac and Subversion host).

Enjoy! :)

Edit: Fixed! Thanks goes out to Sean Swayze for letting me run rampant on his shiny new Intel box.
Adium 0.88 is basically ready for release. It has a nice shiny change set, including being a universal binary for our Intel Mac friends. Unfortunately, there's a remaining problem: on the MSN protocol on Intel Macs, file transfers which work in Rosetta mode don't work when running natively. Further unfortunately, we don't know what the problem is and don't have any Intel machines for testing.

The AdiumTrac ticket on the issue is #2775. I'm ready to have a Universal binary out there, so this regression will remain if nobody can fix it... If you can help, please do so.

The most recent (and hopefully last) of the 0.88 beta series, Adium X 0.88b4 includes Growl 0.7.4b1. Growl users, you'll be prompted to update automatically, no download required as usual. Please see this Growl forum thread and report success or failure if your OS X version / Machine configuration is not yet reported there. Once we know that Growl is good to go, Adium X 0.88 will be ready for release. Thanks! :)

Six people voted for the badged Duck. Three people voted for the status icon only. And one person was ambivalent, just so long as we had a status icon.

So the badged Duck stays. And I'm happy to say that Evan grew to love it too. ☺

As I promised, here are screenshots. These are taken in the Away state:

• Gems:
• iBubbles:
• Chat Bubbles:

The Available and Offline states look the same as they do now: no badge. Also, as I mentioned in a previous post: All other states get a badge, which is taken from your current status icon pack. So if you change status icon packs, the badge will change with it. Also, because the badge image is separate from the Duck images, if you change the Duck images, the badge will not be affected.

Two requests for testing on the joscar branch in Adium (located at branches/adium-joscar in the repository):

1. I need people to test .Mac and ICQ. I don't have accounts on either of these services, so I'd like someone to check and verify that my educated guesses worked out.
2. I need people to test it on Intel. I have no reason to think it'd be broken, but I can't be sure unless someone tests it.

If you can do either of those, check out the source and try it out. Recent trunk builds (IE: as of now) detect converted joscar accounts and make them back into libgaim accounts.

If something breaks, let me know by emailing durin <at> sbcglobal <dot> net with subject "joscar test" and list what you tested.

Thanks.

Adium X 0.88b2 is now available. It fixes a fairly common crash on startup seen only on Intel machines. Some reports indicate that sound is not working on Intel machines; nobody on the Adium team has access to one of these, so we need a programmer with access to one to provide a patch or more information.

Please use Trac (Support & Development) to help with this and report any other issues; the comments section of this blog is NOT a support forum, and support requests there will be ignored.

Adium X 0.88 beta is now available for your testing pleasure. This is not going to be a very exciting release unless you're a member of the Intel-based Macintosh 'elite'; as hard work continues as a fast pace on the next major release of Adium (and it'll be well worth the wait, trust me), we bring you 0.88 primarily as a Universal binary for native support of both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs. We would love to hear from you if you're using an Intel Mac and running the beta successfully (or unsucessfully).

Some people are reporting a build error in SVN, with a couple of missing symbols (kSCPropNetProxiesProxyAutoConfigEnable and kSCPropNetProxiesProxyAutoConfigURLString) in Frameworks/AIUtilities\ Framework/Source/AISystemNetworkDefaults.m. We know about this, and there's nothing we can do about it — the declarations of these symbols were incorrect in the headers that came with Xcode before 2.2, and were fixed in that version.

So if you're having this error, it means your Xcode is out of date. Update to 2.2 release (one person was using a seed of 2.2) and then try it.

The status menu item with badge does not have its own badge icons — it uses your selected status icon pack. So if you change to a different status icon pack, the badge will change with it.

Also, if you replaced your EMD images, the new ones will still be used under the badge.

At least one person doesn't know what I mean by 'badged' in the status menu item. Set your status to Away or Idle or Invisible and you'll see it.

I just committed the revised badging code. SVN users, update to at least revision 14849 14850 to see what it looks like.

I want you to use this for at least a couple of days, up to a week. Compare it to how you liked the previous EMD icon (status-icon-only). After you've given it time and reached a decision, drop us a line — you can find out how at the ContactUs page on the wiki.

UPDATE 4:22 PM: There was a bug (unrelated) in 14849 that kept Adium from launching. Update to 14850.

Those of you who run our current SVN source may have noticed that the EMD (the status menu item which displays in the top menu bar: the Evil Menu Duck) has been in a bit of flux recently. Evan changed it to use a status icon only. I think this looks a bit plain, so I changed it to have a badge. Evan thinks this looks ugly, so he reverted it to the status-icon-only.

So Evan and I worked out a plan — a request for those of you currently running SVN.

1. Over the next day or two, I want you to pay attention to the EMD in different states (available/away/idle/invisible/offline), and think about how you like it as a status icon only. I mainly want you to use it normally.


2. Then I'll commit my current implementation (which brings back the badging, but now resized to no larger than the lower-right quadrant of the Duck). I'll give that a week.


3. Then I want you to email feedback (at adiumx.com) with your opinion: which one do you prefer, and why? What do you like and dislike about the status-icon-only version, and what do you like and dislike about the badged version?

Thanks for your help.