Ayttm: Universal Instant Messaging Client

Ayttm now has a wiki! The wiki will be used for documenting various things about ayttm, from the application architecture to the user manual. The user manual is currently a bunch of unwieldy pages in the website. I'm planning to get all of that into the wiki to make things more manageable.

The primary motivation to do this is that I have to provide a link to the application architecture documentation for the Ayttm workout at FOSS.in. I have already written a first draft of the application architecture as well as an article on writing Service plugins, the latter being rewritten from $(topsrcdir)/doc/eb-service-writing-howto.txt.

This release brings in a number of bug fixes along with a few features:

• Fix a number of MSN related crashes
• Personal status messages support for MSN
• Fix a Yahoo authentication bug
• Yahoo File Transfer
• MSN Invisible login preference finally works again
• Fix the "Check new release" button
• Fix date/time bugs in the tool tips
• Notifications in chat windows
• Autotranslate is fixed. Uses Google Translate now
• SMTP and Livejournal should be working again

See the complete Changelog or download the source from the files section.

FOSS.IN workouts are a good way to get a lot of real work done. The FOSS.IN/2009 Call for Participation is out and we're putting in a workout proposal this year too.

We did a submission last year but it was not accepted. Philip then arranged for a BoF at the event, where he helped to build ayttm on a Ubuntu box and I tried getting async DNS lookups going. Since then, we have managed to take care of a lot of last years wish list with 0.6.0. There are still some remaining and based on that and a few new ones, here's a list of TODOs for the ayttm workout for FOSS.IN/2009.

1. Revive the Windows port. This should be a little easier than before due the fact that a lot of networking code has now been modularized into a single library
2. MSN File Transfer
3. A nice clean smiley set in MNG/PNG format
4. Icons
5. Update translations
6. Implement name completion in chat rooms
7. Package ayttm for $MY_FAVOURITE_DISTRO
8. Port ayttm to $MY_FAVOURITE_OS

Prerequisites

0. Register as a delegate at FOSS.IN/2009

Other than that, the most important prerequisite to participating in this session is to have a prior idea of what you're planning to do. A prior study of the code base would only make things easier. Other prerequisites vary for the tasks and can be mapped by serial number:

1. Knowledge of build tools for Windows. Programming: C/C++, gtk2, glib2
2. C/C++, wireshark dump/tcpdump analysis
3. An eye for design. Knowledge of FOSS design tools (gimp, inkscape, etc.)
4. An eye for design. Knowledge of FOSS design tools (gimp, inkscape, etc.)
5. Should know how to write/update translations
6. C/C++, gtk2, glib2
7. Packaging guidlines for $MY_FAVOURITE_DISTRO. Basic knowledge of building autotools based applications
8. Knowledge of build tool chain for $MY_FAVOURITE_OS

Ayttm has moved to git now! You can browse the source code online or clone the repository as shown in the developer instructions.

This is a heads-up for those who are building ayttm 0.6.0 with the --enable-posix-dlopen to avoid using libtool unnecessarily. There was a bug due to which the msn module would not load. I have fixed that in the latest cvs update (0.6.0-1). Please pull in that fix if you need support for msn and are getting a module load failure message on ayttm start up.

For those who don't really mind libtool and have not used the --enable-posix-dlopen option, this will have no effect on you.