A First Look At Gaim 2.0

surgicaltubing writes to spotlight the progress towards vesion 2.0 for Gaim, the open source, multi-protocol IM client. "The Gaim 2.0 release is nearing its home stretch. The Gaim team released beta 4 last week, with a number of new features and UI improvements." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.

Meebo?

[Evan Meakyl]

I used to use GAIM, but now I greetly prefer meebo ( http://www.meebo.com/ [meebo.com] ), an IM embedded in your browser (with AJAX).
But no files transfer, nor video or audio! But freakly useful!

Still ugly

[mungtor]

The biggest problem for me is that it's still a pretty unattractive interface. It's getting better, and I know a lot of people will shout about the skin-ability of GTK apps, but that is way too much effort.

How hard would it be to just tell it that in a chat window I want to _display_ green text on a black background? I don't want to change what I'm sending (since I don't care past using caps to shout at people), just give me a menu option for "background color" and "text color".

(All the GTK stuff, whether it's GAIM or Gnome or whatever, seems to be spiralling into some ridiculous complexities. It's hard for us non-programmers to get a handle on all the time)

Re:2 Things...

[Zaharazod]

I hate to say it, as a long time Gaim user, but I couldn't disagree more. I honestly cannot imagine the rationale, from a "usability" perspective, for almost all the major UI "improvements" in 2.0. I won't bother making a list, but for example: why on earth was the "online" checkbox removed from the accounts screen? (Having RTFA halfway through writing this, it seems the reviewer had a similar reaction..) Most people probably only have one account; if you DO have more than one, it makes sense that you want it to be easy to use them separately..

Re:Let's not jump the gun

[trip11]

...been waiting for over a year for the software to be released

It is not like this is anything unusual though. Remember the switch from version .59 to .60? That took ages and ages as well, but the result was SO SO worth it. That was when gaim, in my opinion, went from being an ok IM client to being one I actually would use by choice on any platform. Now you could argue that instead of very slow released with tons of changes, that they should try to make more, less substantial changes to the code.

In fact, it's reminding me of Vista's development. Very little information, and feature scale backs

Unlike windows, this is open source, all of the information is sitting there in the CVS commits. If you want faster releases, go compile the code yourself (or find someone to do it for you http://geddeth.dk/downloads/gaim/ [geddeth.dk]) and use it. Much like the transition from .59 to .60 there have been many, very stable betas to help end the frustration of waiting. Both times, impatant users like myself, went and compiled the code for ourselves and were happy. In addition, the gaim developers have become more verbose about what work they have been doing (planet gaim) which is a good thing as well. Now as long as release 2.5 doesn't take 2 years more, we should (hopefully) have voice and video support one of these days too.

In any case, gaim is great piece of software and I'm enjoying using the beta4. If you haven't downloaded it, go try!

Build on OS X [details here]

[reaktor]

http://www.rvantwisk.nl/news/item/archive/2006/aug ust/article/ot-compiling-gaim-200-beta-3-on-os-x-1 047.html [rvantwisk.nl]

This guy posted how he got it working in OS X with fink. Enjoy!