Well, I read Julian’s blog entry about a link history for im clients, rather like those IRC users have been enjoying for years and I thought “Hey, that’d make a great Psi plugin. Now, if only Psi had plugin support.”. Of course, some moments later I remembered my Summer of Code project to write a plugin interface for Psi. I hastily implemented a few more functions, fixed those I’d recently broken and implemented my first semi-useful Psi plugin. Yes, it’s basic. No you can’t close the window, you’ll never get it back. No, the plugin doesn’t know the user’s display name and just shows the jid. On the other hand though, no, this is not a mockup, it’s working exactly as presented below. So, I give you a screenshot of an early alpha of the URL Watcher plugin for Psi.

Categories: Psi
3 Comments »

The second Summer of Code is upon us and it’s a good year for Jabber projects and for Psi in particular (this year’s projects are listed here: JSF SoC 2006 Projects). Of these 10 projects, 4 are aimed at directly at Psi, with a 5th hanging in the balance for the client to be used.

My own project is among those chosen (for which I’m obviously delighted). This project is to add plugin and (Python) scripting support to Psi, something which should be a great benefit to Psi users and also to people wishing to implement new protocol features, who will be able to build upon the Psi codebase to quickly prototype them in Python.

Anyone interested in tracking my progress should keep an eye on my previously mentioned project page on the JSF wiki (unless Peter Saint-Andre comes up with some other tracking system).

Just to prove I haven’t been idle, here’s a quick preview of the early plugins work (no, it’s not faked, these are real (although non-functional) plugins being found).

Oh, and my PhD/thesis? Things are finally looking up again after a stressful period of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I’m constantly amazed by the emotional effects being near the end of a PhD seems to have and I’m extremely grateful to have Cath around to help me stay sane.

Categories: Coding, Jabber, Psi, Research
3 Comments »

For those of you who remember way back into the mists of time, last December we released an experimental Psi branch with voice calling thanks to the libjingle library from Google. Well, while no less experimental, I’ve now ported the libjingle support from the psi-jingle branch to Qt4 and have now merged it into mainline, taking the opportunity to also port to the newest version of libjingle.

This means that if you’re the adventurous type, you can now build Psi with voice calling support, and that this will be compatible with Google Talk clients and any other projects which utilise the libjingle code. We’ll be providing (experimental, no support, no warranties and with a very real danger that they’ll eat your pet hippo and kangaroo) builds for Windows and Mac OSX just as soon as we can get support for those platforms working (expect an announcement about OSX from Remko very soon indeed). The code is, as I am repeating far too often, still considered alpha-quality, however, once everything stabalises a bit more we’ll be able to start including support ‘officially’ and hopefully pretty soon, official Psi builds for future versions will be voice-capable.

I hear the sound of bells in the distance, could they be…….jingling?

Categories: Jabber, Psi
7 Comments »