Ayttm: Universal Instant Messaging Client

Are You Talking To Me?

"Are you talking to me?" or "Ay-wai-tee-tee-em" or "item" - the choice is yours, as long as your audience gets the reference right :-)

Primary difference - and the reason many people choose Ayttm (and EveryBuddy before it) over others - is that we treat a person as the basic buddy entity, while others treat each account as the basic buddy entity. We feel it's more natural to think of a person as, well, a person, rather than a bunch of accounts on different services - which non-geeks don't care about, and seldom understand for that matter.

As a result of this, comes our second major point - automatic fallbacks. If a service fails while you're in the middle of a conversation, say, the MSN server goes down for maintenance, Ayttm will automatically switch to the next available service. In the extreme case, this could go all the way to mailing/smsing the contact (yeah, I [Philip]'ve done that).

AIM and ICQ should be supported with the AIM-Oscar module. It is not well tested however. No one in the (little) development team uses these protocols, so our interest in fixing them is not much. It takes some time to document ourselves, understand the module source code, go into fix/debug/fix/debug loop and so on.

If you really are interested in these protocols and are a developer, patches are welcome.

The short answer is, when it's ready. The long answer is: We've rewritten the protocol module from scratch to support MSNP15 and in the process we have skipped out on a lot of features that existed earlier, like File Transfer and gnomemeeting integration. They should be back in the future.

Smileys work, but only after your conversation has started. This is so because until you actually start chatting, there's no way to know which service you're using, and therefore, which smileys to use.

Ayttm uses the HTTP CONNECT method to get through HTTP Proxies. This message from Arun Shrimali (India) explains what to do:

   find the following line in squid.conf

       #http_access deny CONNECT !SSL_ports

   replace it with

       http_access allow CONNECT !SSL_ports

   But, probably it will open all the secure ports. I am trying to find 
   out another solution also.

   Regards
   Arun
   

Savannah had too many recurrent problems. Project CVS did not work (update or commit sometimes impossible for hours), HTML CVS did not work (auto-update broken for weeks), Mailing-lists did not work (disappearing messages and long delays).

Um, there's just this one that a local artist drew for me (Philip) during the Kala Ghoda Art Festival.