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Pidgin 2.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes "After nearly two years of development, Pidgin 2.0 has finally been released! Originally called Gaim, Pidgin is a powerful and robust open source instant messaging client that supports many protocols. Pidgin 2.0 features a completely redesigned interface with attractive new icons and and a new status management system that was designed for optimal usability. Pidgin 2.0 also adds support for universal buddy icon management and smooth-scroll functionality for conversation windows. A comprehensive review at Ars Technica explores the new features in Pidgin 2.0 and demonstrates how to use the new D-Bus bindings with Python to make Pidgin's status system send updates to Twitter."
So ... will it support VoIP?
If it connects with GTalk (for example) it would be cool (and long overdue)
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
I cant believe that there is no jingle support yet.
IIRC, google released a library for voice extensions to the XMPP protocol quite a while back. When is gaim/pidgin going to incorporate it - so that i can make calls to gtalk users? The other clients like psi, kopete have already done this - why cant gaim?
AOL got upset, as I recall (AIM vs GAIM)
I was going to say 'commercialization', but I don't think that's quite right. I think this is going to be a more common occurrence, with open source project looking beyond simple functionality to usability, appearance, etc, as it does help grab more users, especially in the non-Linux crowd. As long as improving the usability doesn't actually damage the raw functionality, I'm all for it.
Kudos to the developers, pidgin is a much less clunky interface compared to gaim.
Does anybody know what the "Display Notification Message in Conversations" option in psychic mode does?
Do that let people know somehow that you are using psychic mode?
I've been using Pidgin (gaim) for a long time but I just turned that option on today.
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Sure, but by that logic you ought to be using Gaim 1.5. Basically every change to the UI in the 2.0 betas and Pidgin is a step backward. Their bizarre scheme for managing status is horrible and so confusing (and in the betas I've used, outright broken) that I've just stopped setting my status to away at all. They've added that useless Accounts menu to the buddy list, which makes the menu bar so wide that that you can't shrink the window down to a reasonable size without cutting it off (no, a 300 pixel wide window is not reasonable for presenting what is essentially a list of names under 20 characters). In the betas they did horrible things to the conversation window, with pieces misaligned and awkwardly jammed together, but that at least they appear to have cleaned up.
"use the new D-Bus bindings with Python to make Pidgin's status system send updates to Twitter"
Or you could cross-connect the Bullshittean Field Emitter to the Warp Core Ejector using quasi-bosonic tachyon particles.
Any anyhow, shouldn't the Python, having been attracted by the Twitter, eat the Pidgin?
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Works fine, looks different. Differnt icons, simpler layout. More pretty.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
It seems everytime GAIM had a new version, GAIM-Encryption seemed to always be there with a new release of their plugin to work with it. But now that they made all these changes to Pidgin, I don't think Gaim-Encryption has followed suit. Has anyone been able to get the encryption plugin working with Pidgin? The installer for 3.0beta8 doesn't recognize Pidgin and, despite forcing an install, Pidgin won't pick up on the encryption plugin.
I'd say that's the only thing keeping me from embracing Pidgin at the moment. Otherwise, the new UI looks nice.
This is supposed to be a Trillian killer? The interface is horrible! I'm not even talking about the ability to "skin" the application. Simple things like notifying the user if he/she receives mail is ridiculous the way it's implemented.
I like the new UI a lot - functionally, Pidgin is the same as the earlier Gaim 2.0 betas with a sleeker look. It also seems a bit more responsive, IMHO. The Pidgin guys have done a great job, IMHO.
PS: Will we ever get the stock emoticons for each IM protocol back again? The default ones stocked with Pidgin are nice, but i always preferred to see the "original" ones for each client.
It sounds like a jungle midget headhunter. Try looking it up in a dictionary and considering why it might be an appropriate name. It's actually a fairly witty choice, just apparently outside the working vocabulary of most slashdotters.
Perhaps you need to get some exercise for your vocabulary of the English language, so that these new and unfamiliar words do not frighten you so much.
Uh oh. The Pidgin server seems to be hammered, but you can still download it from its SourceForge page.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
I've always rather liked GAIM and it has been a while since there have been real improvements, so I thought I'd take a look and see how far they've managed to come.
I liked
I disliked:
One thing that annoys me is they took the time to add spell checking for both OS's. I love having spell checking in my IM client, but it is not a function that every single program should have to supply by itself. I'm already running a spell checker in my text editor and my layout application and my e-mail client, and pretty much everything else. This is one of several functions that should be provided at the OS level to all applications that want it, not by each application individually. Will they waste time adding grammar checking next? How about translations between languages? What about dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia lookups?
Calling all Windows and Linux developers. It is time to catch up and make universal services a built in function of the OS so developers stop wasting time re-implementing things and concentrate on features specific to their program, like encryption and VoIP support.
I have downloaded and installed Pidgin and it looks nice and all, but it does not seem able to tunnel through our proxy. So far the only IM that succeeds is Miranda which I hate soooo much. :)
The settings that work in Miranda are "" proxy type and proxy name, with no authorisation. No combination of HTTP, SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 with or without my account credentials seems to work in Pidgin. Which is a pity.
I find the main MSN clients Offline Message mechanism very handy when I want to ping a message over to a friend and be sure they get it the next time they login.
Does this new release suport this? GAIM 2 didn't.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
So many complains about GAIM/PIDGIN and still the site is slashdotted.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
What did you download? One of these ?
The Windows installer which includes Gtk+ is 11MB, and the one without is 5.5MB. Or it should be anyway. I don't see anything that is 27MB.
http://fixxxer.cc/blog-en/?cat=9
It's still in the early stages, but it's getting there and has the advantage of being cross-platform and open-source, hoping I can use it to talk to our internal IM network from my linux box.
I'm getting a bunch of guys together, we're gonna sue all the women for trademark infringement. And don't get me started on the blatant discrimination of the Hershey bar.
I am not a crackpot.
What I was interested in, was connecting to GTalk for VoIP. That isn't supported right now.
And that's after two years of development. It's laughable that slashdot needs to quote "smooth-scroll" and "new icons" as a major "feature".
Seriously, this is crazy. There's no webcam support - something that messenger has been doing since forever, and it's a major feature for IM. And no VOIP. That's why I keep using kopete, even if it's a memory pig: At least I do have MSN webcam support. It's sad that OSS IM's are in a so poor state.
If you like the new sounds in Pidgin, you can thank the artist who developed them by going to Magnatune.com and buy his album. Not just because you like the Pidgin sounds, not just because you like Indie Rock, but because you like independent music and independent music publishers like Magnatune. Lot's of good karma available by buying this one.
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
The obvious mental leap is to "pidgin" English. Given the gibberish that a lot of people run back and forth through the chat pipes, it seems like an appropriate name!
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checking for NSS... yes
checking for snprintf... yes
checking for connect... (cached) yes
checking for me pot o' gold... no
checking for gethostid... yes
checking for lrand48... yes
checking for memcpy... yes
See past news articles regarding GAIM vs. AOL lawsuits - Development pace (and scope) was slowed down significantly due to the lawsuit.
In essence, per their lawyers' advice, the developers agreed not to make any major releases while negotiations were going on.
As to why there wasn't too much progress in their betas - if there had been significant progress other than a UI overhaul and bugfixes, AOL would likely have claimed that their "betas" were really releases that were only being called betas as a loophole.
The trademark lawsuit has been fully resolved, so what matters is where things go in the future, and I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of progress now. I wouldn't be surprised if the developers have been working on voice/video support in a seperate codebase somewhere but keeping it quiet until the lawsuits were resolved.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
no, that's the size of the installer. now run that installer and read how much disk space it says is required. "dude".
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Haa? It's pidgin , bradda. You some haoli, you not know pidgin no real English. You learn pidgin lidat because da kine real English too much hana hana. Mahalo!
[
Das How! What is this guy talking about? http://www.twojapaneebruddahs.com/2005_07_01_2jb_a rchive.html ...the definition of pidgin for some 1.2 million people.
If you read above, there are some early attempts at supporting Office Communicator, but none that are very reliable or polished.
The reason is that Microsoft bastardized their SIP/SIMPLE implementation in LCS so badly (in typical Microsoft fashion) that it won't interoperate with any software that is actually SIP/SIMPLE compliant. So lots of IM programs support SIP/SIMPLE, but to talk to MS LCS, they have to break their implementation so badly that they won't talk to anything else!
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I should have one keyring, damn it. This isn't specifically a problem with GAIM-Encryption (and they go over why they chose not to use GPG in the FAQ*), but I have to maintain a keyring for my email, for GAIM-OTR (the encryption plugin I use), and for WASTE--and there's no good reason to do this! The PGP standard has a very robust standard for key management, which should be usable for pretty much any situation--and it is. WASTE keys work exactly like PGP keys do, only you have to import and manage them separately. What gives? Is GPG so hard to interface with that people feel compelled to reinvent the wheel? A quote about SSL channels and a penis-shaped sound wave is coming to mind here.
(Also, I see that there exists a GPG-based Gaim plugin, "gaim-e", but it hasn't been touched in five years.)
* I disagree with some of their reasons; for instance, you can import a key (and thus send someone messages) without signing the key or indicating trust of it in any fashion. A central keyserver is not a single point of failure, because it doesn't define trust relationships, and if you use the web of trust properly, it doesn't matter if someone hijacks the keyserver or not. Also, it's not that hard to put the timestamp inside the encrypted stream; while this is a matter of concern for replay attacks, there's no reason why this should discount the use of GPG's key management system entirely; inserting a timestamp and/or nonce into the IM before sending it (and possibly removing it when it's received and checked for uniqueness/sequence/that it was sent in the last ten seconds) isn't impossible.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
As a Linguistics student taking a course called "Pidgins and Creoles", I should probobly explain the concept...
A pidgin is a language that combines aspects of two languages, and is created by people who have a need to talk to someone who doesn't speak their language. The language usually has words taken from one language, and syntax from another. A pidgin is a language which is used only in certain situations, like an employer giving orders to employees or merchants trading in a marketplace.
If a mixed language becomes the native language of a community, it's called a 'creole' language.
I realize that 'pidgin' has negative connotations because it often arises in social situations like slavery or colonialism, but the languages themselves are not a sign of uneducatedness but a natural result of different language communities mixing.
Note that what Pidgin(the software) does isn't pidgin - it's more like multilingualism with many protocols. A "real" pidgin would be like combining the AIM and MSN protocols into one.
Let it not be overlooked that 2.0 includes "Finch", which is a text mode IM client! (instant messaging in screen)++
I've been using CenterICQ for a couple years, but after trying the last beta of Finch (was gaim-text at the time), I'm sold. It's really slick.
God Fucking Damnit
Actually, he said their lawyers discouraged them from making an "official" release as a show of good faith.
I'm fairly certain he was referring to the reason Gaim 2.0 stayed in beta for so long, NOT hidden extra features.
Take Care
A1miras
iAgree
Jabber is still supported. The account type is now called 'XMPP' though.
"Slashdot - the one place on the internet where guys brag about how small it is." - that IT girl
After much discussion, the Gaim developers decided to call the program Pidgin. "We like the name," Egan told me. "It was the second choice we all really liked. We were thinking up linguistic terms, and someone mentioned Pidgin. Another developer commented that 'corrupted language' may not be the best thing to associate yourself with, to which another pointed out something along the lines of 'have you ever SEEN people talk on IM?'"
(Emphasis mine)
Either he's commenting on the argument used in the name selection in a clever and humorous way, or I'm vastly over-analyzing this...