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aMSN 0.95 Released
An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year since their last update aMSN has published version 0.95. New features include 'webcam support, tabbed chat windows, improved skin plugin support, new file transfer protocol, many new plugins (like Ink and Nudge support), an improved bug report system, as well as LOTS of bug fixes.' In addition to many new features and fixes the aMSN site has been given a face lift to (hopefully) facilitate ease of use."
My download from sourceforge is going at 5kb/s, any mirrors aside from the official one linked on the amsn site?
After having taken a look on their website, aMSN seems to support more MSN features than Gaim: File transfers, webcam.
Anyone who knows more about the specific advantages?
this software is going to be able to keep its name if it gets even remotely popular. I can't help but think Microsoft will come down on him hard.
What really is interesting is the islands of usage in the different IM systems. I use Gaim exclusively, have something like 250 buddies in the aggregate list, of which about a third are active. 90+% of them are AIM. Small number are Yahoo. MSN users countable on the fingers of one mutilated hand.
Really. They've got a nice website. But it requires javascript for downloading, it is broken in my Firefox, bypasses SF's default mirror system (which is bad in my eyes because it makes downloads potentially slower). So whilst I've not tested amsn itself, the website needs work.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
In different areas different systems are popular. In Britain it seems as if MSN is used almost exclusively, and I know only two people who use different networks, although I am now using Google Talk with a few converts from MSN - so that is six more people off MSN messenger. However, I know a lot of American people that use AIM, and MSN seems (as you said) to be somewhat of a rarity.
There's a joke in there somewhere about how many of those 250 buddies are girls that can be counted on the fingers of one, mutilated, oiled hand.
Over here in England MSN Messenger easily has the majority, probably 80+%.
In Brazil, unfortunaly, there are lots of MSN users, and as far as I know it is very popular in France also. I believe that it got late in the IM business, but since it get bundled with windows it has conquered the places where the public didn[ t yet have a favorite IM.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Something messed up with their JS? On Firefox their menu renders into the middle of the page, but it looks fine on IE...
Very true. Canada seems to be going much the same way as Britain. Most people I know in Canada use MSN messenger exclusively. Whereas more of the people I know online (mainly Americans) tend towards AIM and/or YIM.
It's really interesting, actually... To talk to people all over the world you generally need AIM and MSN. Perhaps YIM, but the people who *only* use YIM are few and far between.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
It would be nice to make a map with the geographical spread.
I live in Brazil. My only exclusively-AIM-or-Yahoo contacts are from people in the US. Most of my list is still ICQ because that was the "big one" here years ago, and I say "still" because most new users go to MSN and lots of the ICQ "early adopters" (me included) now have MSN accounts as well. So, I guess in order of popularity, it's:
USA: AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ
Brazil: MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo
Other countries, anyone?
The filesystem is the package manager
MSN is amanzingly popular among the "average" users, and got really strong in Brasil after the launch of Windows XP. They did some TV ads too, but I think that the damn man-in-butterfly-costume scared normal people ;-)
"Go forth, and be excellent to each other" --Bill & Ted
So, it's just a clone of MSN written by someone else, still for windows?
Why is this a big deal?
If it offered multiple clients like Trillian does, or had some snazzy features that MSN didn't already have, I could see it being big news...
Strange indeed, seeing as MSN is probably the least popular messenger between AIM/Yahoo/MSN... I just don't understand the motivation behind writing a clone. Anyone see something I'm missing?
http://www.babysmasher.com
http://www.openingbands.com
I'm not sure I want to chat with anyone that can't use an IRC or Jabber client and it's hardly as if I'm setting a high standard here.
Yes, I agree. However, if one wants to have some of the nice features of msn (no, not nudge!), like webcam or such, you have to use amsn on anything other thatn windows. I have not used amsn for some time, but their msn support is certainly better than gaim's, but gaim aims at many protocols, not just msn. Thus, I think both has a purpose, but it is really pity that a lot of amsn's features ain't merged into gaim. Combined, it'd be helluva IM platform. Alone, gaim don't offer anything shiny for the msn protocol, and amsn don't offer anything for jabber/aim/yahoo.
The really sad thing is that those nets is so divided. It should be like email. Anyone to anyone, regardless of supplier. Only solution to this right now seems to be jabber, which lets me connect to a single point and let that handle the other protocols.
Luckily, google talk is using jabber:) If they just could offer a default gateway for msn, so more people got caught on google talk...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Going IE is not always the best thing to do®, IMHO...
Two, three other packages that support webcams? Where's Gaim in the webcam support arena?
I like Gaim the best of all the packages but it's lack of webcam support is sad.
BTW, what would be a good choice of webcam to buy for Linux that is likely
to work well with whatever comes along? Something economical but solid.
I don't want to waste $10 on a POS cheap cam but I don't want to spend $200 either..
Come on Gaim, get with the program!!
Here's working links to the aMSN download as the ones on the site seem dead...
Linux Installer (need llibstdc++.so.6)
AutoPackage
Debian
Ubuntu
Fedora Core 3
Fedora Core 4
Mandriva 2006 (Formerly Mandrake)
Slackware
Archlinux
Gentoo
Other
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke.
MSN is also disgustingly popular here in Argentina, as i hear it's all over Latin America.
mac torrent: http://freeworld.hopto.org/phpBB/download.php/52/a msn-0-95-final.dmg.torrent
windows torrent: http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3424441 Somebody please post linux torrents
That may be true in the US. However in Asia and Europe a lot of users are on MSN (all my friends in the US are on AIM/iChat while my European and Asian friends are split between Yahoo and MSN)
The A in AIM stands for America. MSN is used almost exclusively in most European countries. In fact, in the past, I knew about the existence of MSN, Y! and ICQ, but I only found out AIM after I started talking to American people online.
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The screenshots exemplify why Linux struggles to gain mindshare amongst Windows users. Font rendering is still awful on Linux and I'm afraid it's looks that count with IM apps. The same is true of that great open source flagship, Firefox. I love using it on OS X and XP but on Linux Firefox can't render simple CSS borders nor line-spacing properly. Websites just look awful viewed with Firefox on Linux (Fedora) and aMSN suffers similar problems with its flaky text. Linux is a serer OS with a half-decent graphics engine but with browsers and IM apps half-decent isn't good enough.
Agree. I live in Venezuela, and while I don't use much IM, I don't think I have any link on my contact list that's from latin america and that uses anything other than MSN (I did use to get the odd random ICQ message/spam, but it's been years since I've gotten one of those). My mother (she is a heavy IMer) has installed yahoo messenger and MSN, but all of her friends (latinamerica and spain) use MSN only. The only reason she installed yahoo was one time trillian (what I use) was having problems connecting to MSN and she installed it as an alternative when she wanted to contact me.
In most parts of Europe MSN dominates all other clients. Germany seems to be the exception. There ICQ and AIm are used a lot more. I don't have any numbers to back it up just experience :(
Read, refresh, repeat.
In canada every1 uses MSN... I used to use ICQ long time ago but then everyone who statrted using internet were using MSN... I had to switch from icq to msn has I only had h4x0rs on my ICQ... too bad MSN is such a memory hog.. aMSN is good to fix this issue but still ain't the same has MSN.. looking forward to try thi release though
This is true. :>
In Norway where I live, MSN seems like the only IM ever used. I tried to stay with ICQ back a few years ago, but since I discovered no one was using ICQ I forgot it and went on with MSN.
IRC is also very popular in Norway, there's a nice norwegian community. It's not IM per se, but it's superiour than IM. I love IRC, I don't understand why people would use IM instead of IRC.
The newest release also features full-speed webcam support.
Western Canada: MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ (I've actually never met someone in real life with an ICQ number)
:)
AIM and Yahoo are somewhat interchangable depending on who you're talking to, due to our close-ness to the states.
In fact the situation here in Germany seems to be different from most of the rest of the world. I use ICQ almost exclusively. The only reason I also have an AIM account was for some contacts from the US.
ICQ even started cooperating with a major TV station, and running some TV ads recently. So it's anything but dead, at least in Germany. And by the way, feature-wise ICQ still seems to be superior to most of the other instant messengers.
The A in AIM stands for America.
Well, technically I believe it stands for "AOL".
i agree. most young users are exclusively MSN. some older users (as myself) had ICQ accounts, which were the most popular until almost 4 years ago. i use trillian, of my local contacts, 90% are MSN, with three ICQ, 1 Yahoo. of my international contacts, the list is much more different, with several AIM and ICQ from europe and other parts of the world, and even some Yahoos! only my geekiest fellows use gtalk or other jabber, like i do.
where's the amd64 .deb !?!?!
why would someone go open source if theres a closed source free version that works fine already out there?
i mean, im in favor for creating open source programs but why even bother - aMSN is adding functionality already given for free from MSN themselves...
Here
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
This amsn release seems to be the first non-iChat client supporting webcam under Mac OS X. Hip hip hurray. If it only had as polished interface as Adium, it would be definately first in a row. Someone behind amsn is way much faster in development than Microsoft itself, with only 5th Messenger version for Mac.
Well being in the UK, everyone I know uses msnim, and why not, one of the biggest advantages of it is being able to use ANY email address by just setting it up with a msn passport, which a lot of people i know including myself have done. I had an AIM account a few years back, just as a few friends used it but they have now gone to msn as well, and i don't know anyone that uses ICQ, or yahoo for that matter (or at least that few that do have it set as a passport anyway.)
...how do you get an MSN chat account in the first place if you don't have a windows machine? I tried to get one with my linux box and it wouldn't let me even register. I'm sure it's something obvious I am missing, but would appreciate the trick for this one, if there is a trick to it. Thanks in advance!
Quebec also (Eastern Canada) - everybody I know, without exception, uses MSN. This may be a teenage (high school/college thing, however - my parents do use Yahoo!
México:
MSN, MSN, MSN, yahoo
Sorry, AIM or ICQ don't exist more.
Here in Glasgow most of the kids use Yahoo. Mostly it was so they could set up local rooms eg "young fleeto room", but AFAIK yahoo stopped this facility. The Yahoo chatroom logs were used in a couple of murder & attempted murder trials. kids bragging etc...
Acid House saves Souls
Sweden: MSN, MSN, MSN, ICQ, Skype (you can use it for IM too)
Nobody here knows what AIM is, and I haven't seen anyone using Yahoo either.
A Linux client that has decent support for webcams (Video Over Linux) support!
I ran modprobe for my webcam kernel module, downloaded the tarball, ran the Tcl script, and it picked up the fact I had VOL and the driver woke up in a second.
Well done!
I used to use aMSN on Mac OS X until I got tired of the resource hog/slowness of it.
Now I use Adium, which is pretty fast and doesnt hog all my precious resources.
This is probably because aMSN is written in Tcl/Tk though and Adium is written in the native Cocoa language and has Gaim as its core which is written in C.
Still I hope one day Adium gets most of the advanced features that aMSN has now, like webcam support.
I wish people would stop making up statistics about IM usage based on their own country or aquintances. Stuff like this "people all over the world" means nothing. There are regions where they use YM almost exclusively, or Gadu-gadu or other stuff.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
You can now webcam chat with overweight IT geeks who can help you fix your probelms in return for flashing your belly button!
The word is a better place.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
...a console-based Win32 app. I found plenty of them for Linux and OS/X but I can't locate any character-based MSN clients for Win32. I'm pretty sure they exist! I googled and I googled, and I googled some more: came up zeros. Anyone else know of one?
No sig for you!
I live in Australia, and with few exceptions, MSN is by far the de facto instant messenger: some people haven't even heard of the others. There's a small minority on Yahoo, and just one of my friends uses AIM - because she has so many friends in the States. I think, partly, this relates to the lack of aggressive marketing on AIM's part in Australia...
Mexico: seems to be mainly MSN (my impression), Netherlands: might be the same.
Perl Programmer for hire
Motivation for this? This works under Linux. Written in TCL. If I have to use MSN to talk to someone I don't have to reboot into my Winders partition.
Bitter and proud of it.
Yeah, here's my knowledge - countries I've had several contacts in, who without exception supplied me with ID from one particular brand of IM to contact them with:
UK: MSN
France: MSN
Germany: MSN
Spain: MSN
Mexico: MSN
Colombia: MSN
Brazil: MSN
Since my portuguese is only about a year and a half old, I don't know this: Do you guys use "o msn" as a noun for anything msn-messenger-related like in Spanish (dame tu msn, entra al msn, tienes msn? etc.)?
PS: I like my list. For some reason I've never needed to talk to an American over an IM network. One time I set up an AIM account, for some site, but that's about all. It has also just occured to me that I can answer my own question from before using google. Hurray!
The primary reason why I don't use the official MSN program on Windows (opting for GAIM) is because of the nudge feature. Why are all the open-source alternatives including it? It's possibly the single most annoying, useless feature of any messenger ever.
not true. yahoo! definitely has control of Taiwan. Everyone there uses it... no one uses AIM, MSN is also fairly prominent, but not nearly as much as YIM.
Norway is pretty much MSN territory..
The most popular IM in China is QQ, sort of based on ICQ but incompatible. After QQ a lot of people use MSN, followed by Yahoo.
My other sig is crap too
I'm in Britain; I don't have MSN; I do have AIM; loads of my friends have AIM and only a couple have MSN.
Obviously my anecdotal evidence is no stronger than yours, but, I'm just saying...
To be honest it's not always geographically based either. The reason I have AIM (and most of my friends have AIM) is because it seems the standard within the drum'n'bass community: if you want to send tracks to label bosses and DJs, you need AIM, simple as. Whereas none of them have MSN really.
On the other hand, in psytrance, MSN seems more popular.
No one claimed these to be definitive statistics, they were just remarking on their experience of a trend. For what it's worth, my experiences of the UK and US are the same.
The "a" in aol stands for america :)
So far, as in school and in office, in Japan, I only saw people use MSN.
I used ICQ when talking to people in the USA some years back, but lately, I only use MSN for any domestic im. I guess some use Yahoo, but I never even saw a person use AIM here.
That must be why so many people send me buddy requests on MSN in either Spanish or Portugese.
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
after mIRC came, irc went to hell. ;)
with im, you at least get to filter the tards a bit better.
nothing like the feeling of some fresh irc to piss me off.
still addicted to it tho
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
...try Mercury Messenger for MSN+webcam support on Windows, Linux & MacOSX. Its done multi-platform webcam for awhile. It also supports receiving video conferences on Mac & two way video conferencing on Win/Linux. It also has a ton of other features.
In Malaysia normal folks use Yahoo Messenger (mostly) or YM with MSN, and the crazy Microsoft wingnuts who daydream about fellating Bill Gates use MSN exclusively.
The area I live in (Western Kentucky), almost everyone uses MSN. They just love the nudges, "winks" (100x100 flash animated movies that pop up over everything, and dance around, etc. Why they are called winks, I will never know), and all the other bs that comes along with it. Almost nobody uses AIM or YIM.
Sig: I stole this sig.
As in North or South America?
China here (Beijing). A few years ago the market was dominated by a Chinese program called QQ, but these days MSN has a bigger share. QQ still advertise heavily, but they're fighting a losing battle.
..they would learn to embrace this project, and other open source projects. As it stands, this MSN messenger clone is better than the official Mac MSN client as far as feature implementation goes. Since it is written in TCL/TK, it doesn't run very well in terms of speed (I'm on a Mac Mini 1.42 Ghz/512 MB Ram). The official MSN client runs a lot faster than this clone. Of course, if they contributed to this project to expand it's user-base, but it would ultimately mean for them that someone will make a parallel version of the client that stripped out all of Microsoft's advertisements and propaganda.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Australia (NSW, anyway) appears to be predominantly MSN. There are still a few AIM users left over from the ICQ days, but you don't see many of them.
Yep. ICQ was a hit way back in day, until people discovered that the MSN client didn't suck quite as much as the bloated ICQ monstrosity, and suddenly everyone seemed to switch. Note, this was the bare-bones cut-down version before the tabs and avatars/icons were available.
There was showstopper bug in aMSN (and Tkabber) when using Tcl/Tk compiled with --enable-threads option under linux kernels 2.5+. I believe it is not Debian-specific issue. Is it fixed already?
igor
i am a mac user thanks to my parents not being willing to fork out money to buy me a decent computer (i got the mac from an uncle who didnt need it because they were upgrading to powerpc G5's) so when i found aMSN it was a god send however i have been having some problems. 0.95 is horribly laggy and often crashes where as 0.94 ran great. any suggestions as to how i could get 0.95 to run faster or should i just switch back to 0.94?
*peace,love and all that jazz* -Gary
It seems mirrors and SF download pages are slow or down... try downloading from :
0 3
http://agoodm.plus.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7
- or-
http://amsn.amnestysalinas.org/
Torrent links are available at :
http://amsn.recordingground.com/viewtopic.php?t=1
I live in Denmark, have ~100 contacts on my contact list and most of them are active. About half of them live in Denmark, a quarter in other parts of Europe and a quarter in other parts of the world. In that last quarter I have 2-3 Americans (country, not continent). They are the only one using AIM. Everyone else use MSN exclusively.
Very interesting.
:-)
Here in Romania, everyone is using YIM, whereas I can confirm that everyone I now from U is on MSN...
I use Trillian
what's wrong with IRC? still works fine for me. being the network admin helps though ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
AIM (and ICQ) were destroyed by MSN pretty much everywhere outside the US because they didn't have a localized version of their clients back then, and using a software of that kind where you can't understand most of the interface isn't fun. Most of my friends couldn't use AIM/ICQ for this very reason, and then MSN came along with ease of use - and localization - and got nearly 100% of the userbase.
Which is a good thing, because (at least the official) client is so much better.
for those who didn't read the article.
It appears MSN servers will block some words the example given is "download.php"
I tested this and it appears to be true.
sending download.php to a friend on MSN resulted in a message saying this message was not delivered.
now this means that each and every line of text sent over MSN is parsed for content.
it also means the msn server has a function built in to carry out a different action depending on what the parser found.
The implications are that there are other phrases which could be used to maybe target specific advertisements at an individual user or perhaps create an alert that someone should take a look at an individuals msn chatting history.
As a nonamerican I don't have any rights as far as this goes. in fact I probably agreed to have my conversations recorded in the EULA.
Is there anyway to avoid this happening I guess that the answer is no. but it might not be too hard to make it a lot more expensive to routinely monitor everything we say.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Still no reason to use this over KDE 3.5's Kopete.
When I've first seen the article about download.php, I kept wondering why microsoft would select such string, instead of, for instance, sourceforge or freshmeat. Seems like they block download.php as a very idiot way to avoid people from spreading the MSN Plus download link.
"Go forth, and be excellent to each other" --Bill & Ted
But that is because it's a difference between IRC and IM. IRC is more like a community. I don't mind the "tards", I can avoid them if I want to :)
As far as version release articles go on /., this is not a horrible one.
/. product releases, I never saw it before today and I had no idea what it was for without researching it.
But, since it wasn't explicitly mentioned, aMSN is an open source MSN Messenger IM clone.
And, like many other
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
In jamaica MOST ppl use MSN probably because we are a former british colony :)
Since my portuguese is only about a year and a half old, I don't know this: Do you guys use "o msn" as a noun for anything msn-messenger-related like in Spanish (dame tu msn, entra al msn, tienes msn? etc.)?
Yes. I've never seen the name MSN being used in Brazil in any non-MSN-Messenger-related context.
The filesystem is the package manager
I live in Nova Scotia, and everybody I know uses MSN. One person I know from the states uses all of them on Trill, I know nobody on Skype or Google. Only a few years ago, just about everybody was using ICQ. I havn't really used ICQ in years and I still know my number...
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
...Damned Alvaro's MesSeNger and see if the judge has a sense of humour.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What else is new? AIM has been doing this for years.
Scott
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