beta7
Posted by Luke Schierer under Pidgin | Permalink | | Leave A Comment
We released beta7 last night. I think Sean scared people off by saying that this is the first of the betas to actually be of “beta” quality. Still, there have been about 15 thousand downloads of it so far, and very few bug reports. My colleagues deserve the credit for this, working very long and very hard to get as many of the bugs squashed as they could in the last week or so.
One interesting thing that I note afresh today, as I have in the past, is the “interesting” phenomena in which a user will think that multiple repeated requests will change the answer. One user responded to a series of questions in his ticket (#414) with simple repeated assertions that he dislikes the change to use only status icons. When I closed his ticket, he responded by opening five or ten new, entirely duplicate tickets. Another user, this time in #pidgin on irc.freenode.net, tried asking the same question in three or four different ways across an hour or two, hoping to find a different answer.
Still, overall it has been very quiet, which makes me happy. I hope, but do not expect, that the final release (hopefully later this week) will go as smoothly.
Hi Luke,
I’ve been thinking about this issue of hiding the protocol in use. Initially I preferred it, but speaking with some friends about this I actually have a good reason to bring it back.
At my work place we use an internal Jabber server that uses SSL to ensure company confidential material is both encrypted and passing over our own systems (not Microsoft et al). I have many contacts that have MSN, Jabber, Yahoo etc, personal accounts and work accounts.
It is a requirement that you know which account you are using because you may start discussing items that are not work related and want to take them off the work IM system, or vice-versa. Its particularly important for our workplace (where we standardise on GAIM/Pidgin) to ensure employees are fully aware that they are using the internal system or not and thus their comms (and thus company confidential material) are secure.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the ‘presence’ based system and most of the time I don’t care which protocol I use. But there are security concerns over people not being aware they are using MSN instead of say a secure system for work related matters…
Is there perhaps a way in chat window…perhaps in the toolbar? to show the icon of the protocol you are using? with the icon having the drop down list similar to the ‘Send To’ menu? to at least some quick identification?
I would be interested in your thoughts on this.
Best regards, Alex
I think 2.0b7 is the best release in a very long time! It’s very stable too. It hasn’t crashed once since I installed it some days ago on two of my computers. I love the new look too. The only negative thing I can think of is that I seem to get a few more “switchboard errors” after the last beta, but that might be completely unrelated.
Good work! I’ll keep bugging you guys in Trac whenever I feel something is quirky or needs an improvement. ;-)
Alex, I understand your concerns. Still, I think reversing this decision would be a poor way to address them. Deryni addressed a very similar concern in http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/414#comment:60. Essentially, what you need is not the protocol of the top buddy, but the protocol of the current conversation. A plugin could add a protocol icon to the conversation without too much trouble. There is a notification area in the top of the conversation window. While Pidgin itself uses this only for the typing notification, it is accessible to plugins to add icons of their own there.
I suspect if you were to write such a plugin, we would accept & maintain it. This is not our usual course when dealing with plugins, but I think it would help people to accept the new way of looking at IM, and deryni has expressed that he would be willing to accept it as well.
[...] were to message someone in your buddy list. After reading the discussion in the bug report and the comments on his blog post, I can only conclude that the Pidgin developers are only coding for themselves. They are presenting [...]