We're excited to announce that Adium will be a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code. Summer of Code is a program that offers students an amazing opportunity to become involved in open source programming, including a very generous stipend for their summer work. Please see Adium: Summer Of Code for information on the competitive application process and some suggestions of possible project ideas. We're eagerly anticipating reading student applications once the application process opens on May 1.

Adium X 0.89.1 is now available. While 0.89 was intended to be the last release of the 0.8x release cycle, a recent increase in preventable ICQ Authorization spam has prompted this bugfix release. ICQ "web aware" mode has now been turned off; it was responsible for a significant portion of the authorization request spam many ICQ users were receiving.

Adium X 0.89.1 also updates the Sametime library code (libmeanwhile), fixes a common problem with Applescripting account status, and fixes a problem with the Dutch localization.

Finally, with this release we welcome Turkish speakers to the international Adium community with a Turkish localization. :)

Today, Colin and I (he's co-writing this post—yay SEE!) are going to talk about joscar, a new and major feature of the upcoming 1.0 release.

Joscar is a library written in Java for interfacing with services that use the OSCAR protocol. There are three of these: AIM, ICQ, and .Mac. Other services use different protocols that are not OSCAR; for this reason, we'll still be using libgaim for these services.

Joscar was written by Keith Lea (username “leak” on Trac), originally as part of the Joust client. He has helped Evan and Augie tremendously with getting it working in Adium.

With joscar, file transfer and Direct IM actually work. Finally, an end to the inability to send and receive files (at least on AIM-esque services). And joscar has a cleaner codebase, so Adium developers can read and modify it more easily. It's faster, too; faster, even, than libgaim.

Libgaim is not going away, however. As mentioned above, we still need it for other protocols. So 1.0 will still have libgaim, for all the non-OSCAR services. (UPDATE 2006-10-08: Also, joscar's ICQ support is not very shiny yet, so we're still using libgaim for ICQ in the meantime. —Peter)

If you have any further questions about joscar, feel free to ask them in the comments, on the forums, or on the IRC channel.

More a 'hotfix' than a release, Adium X 0.89.1 beta 1 is now available. It should be a very short beta cycle.

UPDATE: April fool. ;)

We're pleased to announce, jointly with the ChatKit project and Apple, that Adium (powered by ChatKit) will replace iChat in Leopard.

A future version of Adium, with ChatKit installed, is now running and working in prerelease builds of Mac OS X 10.5. These builds are currently only available to the Adium and ChatKit development teams. Here are some screenshots:

• 
  (courtesy of ChatKit developer Ofri Wolfus)
• 
  (courtesy of Growl project lead and Adium project manager Christopher Forsythe)

That's right — iChat's video support has been merged into ChatKit, and Adium can thereby use it. It's the best of all three worlds!

Other features of the merged Adium-ChatKit-iChat experience:

• Buzz support, integrates with your iPod (now you can be BUZZed on the go!)
• External Buzz: Adium can knock on your friends' doors to let them know they have messages waiting (requires external hardware, not included)
• Security feature: contact list moves away from your mouse cursor, making it impossible for unauthorized users to double-click on your contacts
• Pink Adiumy
• Boredom meter measures time since last message; can be configured to ring when the conversation is getting too boring
• Intel Core Duo
• Smart contact list groups with iTunes integration
• Wireless integration with iPod's games: Play games like Brick and Music Quiz over IM
• .Mac synchronization
• Live graphics
• Close widgets have been freshly polished
• Click wheel
• Built-in disc-burning support — IM on the go!
• Support for IM over RFC 1149 transports (with the Duck-Pigeon Adapter)
• Even more tasty sandwiches

Some features are still in development, and will come in a future (post-Leopard) release:

• Electroshock buzz (requires external power supply and plug-in)
• Popcorn
• IM over Blu-Ray (requires that both you and your contact be downhill from each other)
• Interplanetary IM