Gaim Releases Version 1.0.0

bfree writes "Congratulations to all in the gaim team as they release for download version 1.0.0 (changelog). For those who don't know what gaim is, you could read the full answer on their site but for the lazy: 'Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.' Gaim is also the 2nd most active project on Sourceforge and the 4th most popular on Freshmeat and seemingly all round #1 Free IM client!"

Comments

gaim

[twenty-exty-six]

Gaim is easily one of the best open-source apps for non-tech savvy users. Without gaim (and Firefox) I wouldn't have been able to convince some of my friends to try linux.

Re:gaim

[BladeMelbourne]

as far as windows is concerned is gaim better than miranda?

Yes and no. IMHO it's up to the end user to decide what their IM needs are, and choose based on that.

Miranda is a fantastic program - really small with plenty of plugins. The interface is much more responsive than Gaim - it's a very lean program.

That said, one thing GAIM can do is provide the ability to chat in Yahoo rooms. Miranda sadly can't do that (to the best of my knowledge).

I have both installed - they are both quality open source programs with very active communities.

why 1.0?

[MoOsEb0y]

There isn't a lot of difference between 0.82.1 and 1.0. Why have they decided that this should be version 1.0?

Re:why 1.0?

[Surye]

Long discussion on name change. To sum it up, just because.

Re:why 1.0?

[Surye]

No, they made it quite clear in the IRC, and in the lists that it has nothing to do with core goals met. Simply wanted a new, more flexible naming scheme then "number of releases" which was broken anyways during 0.59.x

Re:why 1.0?

[SLOviper]

I'm not exactly sure why they went to 1.0 either - although it has been much more stable than ever before (since 0.7). I guess they figured that it was good enough to "officially" release.

For those interested, here is the changelog from the sourceforge site:

version 1.0.0 (09/17/2004):
New Features:
* Drag-and-drop buddy support for the Invite dialog (Stu Tomlinson)
* Drag-and-drop buddy support for the Pounce dialog (Stu Tomlinson)
* View Chat log available from the interface (Daniel Atallah)
* Ability to receive offline messages in character encodings
other than ASCII (thanks to Nick Sukharev)
* File transfer status messages printed to conversation
windows (Dave West)
* Display file transfer messages when someone sends you a file
over AIM (Dave West)
* Handle MSN buddy lists more sanely (Felipe Contreras)
* Zephyr can use tzc to run from behind a firewall (Arun A Tharuvai)

Bug Fixes:
* Work around window manager stupidity with new dialog windows (Dave West)
* Compile with gtk 2.5.x (Gary Kramlich)
* Escape invalid characters in log names (Daniel Atallah)
* Fix for clicking add in an msn chat with 2 or more people in your buddy
list (Daniel Atallah)

Re:why 1.0?

[twener]

Because Kopete went to 0.9 recently?

Re:why 1.0?

[SimGuy]

People have (and we knew this way ahead of the actual release) this horrible misconception that 1.0.0 is Gaim's first major stable release, but for those too lazy to read the discussion on the mailing list, Gaim's versioning is very simple, and 1.0.0 is completely insignificant. We could have started at 12.8.17, but 1.0.0 is a nice place to start numbering from and not break package managers version comparison logic or seeming too completely random....

Example versioning:

1.0.0: First release with this numbering system
1.0.1: No changes to Gaim's API; New features, bugfixes
1.1.0: New Gaim API added; none removed or changed
1.2.0: Same as above
2.0.0: Gaim API changed or removed breaking plugins or anyone using libgaim.
2.0.1: No changes to API; New features & bugfixes
2.0.2: et cetera

As I placed in the topic of #Gaim:

1.0.0! Not special in any way, other than that you should be using it.

Re:why 1.0?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Personally, I think the first version that's released should be v1.0. All of this "using v0.2934.d.342.beta" crap is freaking stupid. *cough* Firefox *cough*.

Yes, I understand "it's not ready yet". If people are downloading it and using it, it's ready.

Definition of irony

[Toasty16]

I just used Trillian to tell my buddies on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and IRC about gaim 1.0.0

They don't care.

The most active

[nyri]

In fact, Gaim is the most active projecy on the sourceforge. The list is (from the sourceforges main page):
1 Gaim
2 eGroupWare: Enterprise CollaborationAccepting Donations
3 Azureus - BitTorrent ClientAccepting Donations
4 FCKeditorAccepting Donations
5 phpMyAdminAccepting Donations
6 Compiere ERP + CRM Business Solution
7 OpenWFEAccepting Donations
8 SugarCRM Accepting Donations
9 WinMergeAccepting Donations
10 POPFile - Automatic Email ClassificationAccepting Donations

Maybe being slashdoted increased its activity...

Re:The most active

[TunaPhish]

No, Gaim is almost always on top. They're pretty good about having a two-week release schedule.

You can check out #gaim on freenode and actually see how active it really is. Most of the developers are there on a daily basis working on stuff.

Too heavy..

[thewalled]

gaim lost out to miranda (http://miranda-im.org) for one of my customers.. his problem gaim is too heavy / resource intensive for their workstations (here in india most workstations at still stuck at celeron ~700 or so + 64 MB ram and run 98SE).

miranda on the other hand works quite nicely, btw we use jabber only (no msn/yahoo/icq/oscar support).

Re:Too heavy..

[Motherfucking Shit]

To illustrate my points, I've created a series of screenshots. They demonstrate the large amount of screen real estate that gaim takes up on Windows compared to AIM and ICQ, the offset preferences window that gtk generates compared to AIM's small and centered preference window, and the disk space required by AIM, ICQ, gaim+gtk, and AIM+ICQ vs. gaim+gtk.

My conclusion is obvious, but please draw your own. You should definitely install gaim 1.0.0 if you haven't already, even if only to test it out.

Re:Too heavy..

[netsharc]

Actually, if you turn off "Show Buddy Icons" (somewhere in the Preferences), Gaim shows only the 16x16 protocol icons, which makes for a buddy list which is a lot more compact, therefore smaller as well, especially without the ads.

The problem of directory sizes, is that Gaim installs all possible languages -- you can set LANG=?? as an environment variable and get Gaim in that language. I suppose you can delete the unnecessary language files to save space. And from the looks of it, you're using ICQlite. Whatever happened to the full-blown ICQ, which installed a light web-server so people can visit your "homepage" and even chat to you through a Java-Applet of sorts.

no mac binary

[Leers]

from those of us who don't regularly compile our own software, I don't think gaim qualifies as mac compatible till someone bothers putting a mac binary on their site.

Re:no mac binary

[oboylet]

While its true there's not a readily available binary of 1.0.0, you can always use fink/darwinports to get the latest stable binary, which right now is .8.2.1 here.

I agree, its misleading, and the gtk2/x11 port is butt-ugly, it does work.

For gaim on osx I prefer adiumx [adiumx.com].

Re:no mac binary

[knutal]

I don't think gaim qualifies as mac compatible till someone bothers putting a mac binary on their site.

A port of gaim to osx needs a port of gtk first, which is some time into the future, the GTK+OSX project aimed at this but with gtk1.x, not gtk2. Anyway, that project seems far from finished... You can ofcourse install it under X11, or you could try out adiumX, which uses the core library of gaim anyway.

Video/audio sound support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Gaim 1.0... Good...

But, what I _really_ need is video/audio support for MSN, Y! and AIM. I am asking for this for 2 years now, no one in the OSS community has managed to integrate something like that to a multi-IM application.

No, Gnomemeeting is not the same, it is not compatible with the 99,9% of the IM world. It is a conference app, I just need integrated video/audio for MSN, Y! and AIM.

Re:Video/audio sound support?

[Surye]

gaim-vv

Re:on the mac...

[oboylet]

A better question might be: why should I prefer it to adiumx [adiumx.com]? Adium is essentially a mac-friendly gaim.

Adiumx has a really straight forward user interface, and feels very mac-like. It supports a laundry list of protocols, but keeps things simple yet powerful in terms of UI.

True, you won't find all the gee-gaws from iChat AV a la video/teleconfrencing, but it's a well written program that does IM extremely well (much better than iChat ... *cough* tabs, easily set up for multiple users of the same computer, etc *cough*).

And it's not resource intensive.

1.0 and no gaim-vv merge?

[Mmm coffee]

While I'm glad to see gaim moving on to a "stable" number, wouldn't it be smart to wait until the boys at gaim-vv got video and voice chat working? Gaim rocks for an instant messaging client, but can't do the major stupid little things that the "official" clients can do. This may turn off users who see 1.0 and expect it to do that...

Then again, I might be paranoid and need to have my morning coffee.

1.0.0 is just a version number scheme change...

[atallah]

Not to burst anyone's bubble... but i've been waiting for this story to hit the front page just so i could!

This isn't a 1.0 release it is a 1.0.0 release: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?threa d_id=5592699&forum_id=33079

All it means is that future releases will be in X.Y.Z format. X will mean a change to the API breaking old plugins, Y is any other change, and Z is pretty much meaningless.

my gaim experiences

[bmajik]

i remember when i was in school and my primary workstation was a used IRIX machine.

I went through the pain of getting gtk built on my machine, and actually emailed the gaim people (just 2 guys back then, iirc) some trivial diffs to make gaim not die on irix.

Back in school i think i complained about how linux-centric f/oss software was (nothing written by a linux user ever clean compiled on irix... and not often on solaris..) and gaim was certainly not stellar in this regard..

Now i'm less antsy about such things.. and despite not really like the "penguin pimps" attitude i seem to recall the gaim crew having,
AOL AIM client for Win32 is so bad that installing Gtk32 and Gaim seems like the path of least resistance :)

It's nice that there's a non-AOL AIM client. I'm an IE, Media Player, and XP user, but even I can't stand AOL's installers and apps :)

Re:on the mac...

[Trillan]

I tried Fire, I tried Proteus, and I tried Adium. For multi-protocol, I use Adium.

But on a day-to-day basis for 99%+ of my chats, I use iChat. I like the simplicity, the stability, and the way the menu works. Make no mistake, it's a one trick pony... but it does that trick very well... much better, I think, than Adiun.

I am starting to think that both skins and customization are highly overrated. What's needed is a single good skin. The ability to custmoize is nice, but far less important than having a good skin already there.

Gaim rules.

[BrookHarty]

I use Gaim, but a few annoying things.

Normal windows popups when re-connecting, so if you are in the middle of typing, it gets the normal windows treatment of stealing focus. I hate focus stealing popup windows.

MSN re-connects alot, need to hide that...

Be nice if you could change your IM preferences under gaim, most you have to use the real client.

Forced alias's change when the user changes their nick.

Can't change themes without re-installing.

But for an all 1 in one client, its the best.

Re:No bugs anymore?

[seringen]

But a version 1 implies no more bugs, wil there be no bugs in GAIM??

yes, there will NEVER be any bugs in GAIM, EVER!! Even when Yahoo purposely breaks their protocol again, the super hyper gaim fairies will magically fix connectivity for you. We are blessed!

That's cool and all, but...

[Parnic]

I won't be happy until 1.0.0.0 comes out...hopefully that will fix the nasty "version number isn't obfuscated enough" bug.

For those with a more text-based outlook

[phaze3000]

Try bitlbee - an IRC to IM gateway. I've been using it for sometime and it's superb, I can use my favourite IRC client (irssi) to chat to everyone via an ssh session to my box at home, whatever server room I happen to be holed up in at the time.

Gaim still lacks native encryption

[0x0d0a]

You still don't get native encryption with Gaim, and Gaim lacks GPG support for Jabber (as Gabber does). The only way to get support is to download gaim-e, which frequently doesn't build with the current gaim.

Another Protocol...

[elFarto the 2nd]

For those of you who are sick of using the Sametime client, Meanwhile is a plugin for Gaim to let you use Sametime.

It's availible from http://meanwhile.sourceforge.net/

Regards
elFarto

GAIM has opened a lot of doors

[Erik Hollensbe]

I'm not a big fan of GAIM the client.

However, I'm a huge fan of libgaim.

Does anyone remember mICQ? They were the first people to reverse engineer the ICQ protocol. Until then, you were forced to use the seriously crappy Java ICQ client if you wanted to use it on anything but windows.

micq however, IMO of course, was a crappy text-based program that had a horrific interface. Really, I would much rather use my IRC client for ICQ than stick with this thing.

And now I can. See, the micq guys caught on and released libicq or libmicq, I can't remember at this point. I imagine a good portion of this code is still in libgaim.

The point is though, that others took libicq and applied their UI design skills and made very useful programs out of it.

And this is what I get in libgaim.

I'm not a fan of how you have to contort gaim or work on a specific system with specific plugins to keep windows from popping up on you while you're typing. (I will admit it's been a while since I used gaim, so this climate may have changed)

However, if you wanted the best support for the various networks out there, GAIM is the way to go.

libgaim allows me to get rid of the (IMO again) clunky interface and replace it with something else. On the mac, my workstation, I use AdiumX, but before I used Fire (no link, sorry). Both are libgaim-based which means that the advances in this library (especially recently as YIM and MSN seem to change their protocols hourly) are almost instantly integrated into the front-end of my choice. The 'hive mind' mentality here is very effective.

I *really* wish that more people working on protocols would do this - right now, several HTTP libraries are available but developers refuse to settle on one - I hope apr solves this once and for all. I don't want to worry as a developer about the idiosyncracies of apr, libwww, and others when developing a web app.

Object brokers are another example. If I install GNOME, KDE, and any other app that uses an ORB, chances are I have many ORBs on my system - for what reason? Those "extra" features that the developer can't live without. I know GNOME and KDE are finally working on making it cross-platform (in the GUI sense), but this provides another good example.

Do what you like at the GUI or application level - but normalize the libraries (and make MORE of them that meet specific, unique needs so they can be chained together). This gives the developer a reasonable notion of stability at the library and API layer, and the user a reasonable notion of functionality. Also portability, security, and enhancements come quicker and cheaper because more eyes are looking at the same code. Fix a buffer overflow? Well, you've fixed it in 20 programs instead of one. Doesn't that make everyone happy?

Sorry for the rant. I just feel the need to talk about important topics on my mind that no one will listen to or care about because they're buried at the bottom of a slashdot forum. :)

Gaim log analyzer

[RainbowSix]

Here's a half-baked log analyzer that I wrote in a weekend. It works with GAIM log files for the AIM protocol format up to about version .72 (I run it on .59.9, the last GTK 1 version).

Here is an example of its output on my primary username.