Ayttm and the OSS IM scenario
Philip Tellis
ayttm
A brief history of IM
- gAIM (Mark Spencer)
- gaim2 and everybuddy (Torrey Searle)
- gaiming the system (Rob Flynn)
- everyone else joins in
The others
- Fire (2001)
- Kopete (2001)
- CenterICQ (2002)
- Miranda (2003)
chmod +wx bluesmoon
- Late 2000, everybuddy is my first IM client
- Jan 2001, I fix a few bugs in the Yahoo! code
- March 2001, I've unknowingly become maintainer
- Spend more time on the code
- December 2003, fork off ayttm with Colin Leroy
Nobuddy
- Everybuddy was going nowhere
- Problems with UI, stability, lack of features
- More prefs than features
- Just too complicated to use
And to the buddy were born two sons
- Meredyyd Luff started the eb-lite project
- Colin and I started ayttm - to stabilise everybuddy
Are you talking to me?
- ayttm was a typo
- ayttm is a backronym that was expanded by a user
- ayttm is an item
- ayttm is a question
- ayttm inspired the matrix (just kidding)
Features
- Chat on Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, ICQ, Jabber, IRC and using SMTP
- Fallback messaging
- Webcam support
- Aycryption, Auto translation, Plugins
- and more
building the community
- Most everybuddy users moved to ayttm
- Feature requests turned to offers of help
- Some users submitted patches (eg for GTalk)
- Some wrote documentation
- Subhash Jeyan sent me a Webcam
Letting go
- March 2004 I had to quit the project
- We weren't planning on too many more feature additions
- But we still used the old gtk-1.2 library
What's needed now?
- gtk2 port - happening (Siddhesh Poyarekar)
- A real user interface person needs to look at the UI
- Add in that ever elusive voice support
- Indian language support
What's needed now?
- gtk2 port - happening (Siddhesh Poyarekar)
- A real user interface person needs to look at the UI
- Add in that ever elusive voice support
- Indian language support
Why should you work on it?
- There's a lot to learn from the really smart people in the community
- You could end up on TV
or have your mugshot on a tshirt
- The thrill of looking at someone's desktop and thinking,
that's my code you're running
.
Greetz
- The great Torrey Searle for being such an inspiration
- My friend, Colin Leroy for starting ayttm and teaching me so much
Made with Eric A Meyer's S5
