Announcing aMSN2!!!!

[WM-666]

looks very promising !
I hope the features (smilies, webcam, voice,...) will be there too !

[kakaroto]

The name says aMSN, so we'll deliver the same features!

[Moredhas]

Okay, I know it's early days yet, and I don't mean to pressure anyone to hurry up, but does anyone know, vaguely, when we might see a working beta release?  I don't expect it tomorrow, or even next month, but it would still be nice to know

[kakaroto]

Moredhas : how do you expect us to know? :p
seriously, it could be 'working' tomorrow, or in 3 months... noone knows until it's done... it depends on everyone involved, how much free time they have, and what task they'll be doing, and how much time it will take them them to do it, and how many problems they run into, etc...

[Cypher]

Yes ! News about aMSN2 Sweet... Long live the Qt4 front-end !

Thank you all for your amazing work.

[Moredhas]

Ah, sorry.  I was just curious about a target date, or something similar .  One of those things open source projects announce to keep the masses quiet, and then ignore as it goes by

[1009]

I feel amsn2 will be a revolution so I try to put my ideas into these changes.

I think amsn2 should be integrated with projects like micropledge.com and cofundos.org.

In synthesis, with these two systems users can donate or pledge to a specific part of an open source project. They don’t have to donate to the entire project.

A concrete example: in amsn2 there are gtk, qt, efl... I'm an user and I want to donate to improve only my favorite GUI because another one, that I don't like, is growing to fast ..
With the traditional donating system I can't do it, while with micropledge or cofundos I can.

In my opinion, the problem of amsn2 (and open source projects in general) is not the quality of the code but the speed. The quality become good but the developing time is too slow
Developers have also a real life and don't have full time to code.

Lots of guys here want amsn2 ready tomorrow (for example: myself) but now they can do quite nothing to solve the lack of time in developers' real life.

The self-destructive mind process is like this:
"I don't want to donate to this GUI or this specific part of the project, that i don't like, so i don't donate at all"

I think that the multi-front-end approach of amsn2 is perfect to inaugurate these innovative open source payment systems.


PS
I think micropledge is better than cofundos because it will have soon an integration with a nice bug tracker: trac. http://blog.micropledge.com/2008/02/bug-trackers-get-bounties/

only for trolls message:
I'm not advertising two fraudulent market projects that try to steal money from OSS, so if you don't know what they are, look around in their websites: http://micropledge.com/ and http://cofundos.org/

[cquilliam]

Wow, very exciting news indeed.  I am definatly looking forward to the multi-frontend, as good as amsn looks today, Tk does look dated, even with 8.5's antialiasing.

Congrats to all the developers, and I'm so happy to see all the different projects joining forces to create one msn client to rule them all.

[clookie]

hey, the little movie looks great
if that's going to be it wo_o
btw: alencool's link's don't work anymore :-)
you guys are really the best!
aMSN 4ever

[1009]

Why don't you integrate ereseva GUI?
http://code.google.com/p/ereseva/wiki/Screenshots

[kakaroto]

@1009 : ereseva is another client, if they want to help, they can.. we're not "integrating other client's UI", we just have a front end maintainer team and they do it the way they want, the team for the gtk front end is part of the emesene team, but it doesn't mean they'll use emesene' GUI code either...
About donations, interesting stuff, but we don't take donations... we use sourceforge's donation system, and it's on a per-user method.. if you want to help one of the developers who has been helpful for you, you can do it (if they accept donations)... but the project itself doesn't take any donations...

[why.arent.guests.allowed]

This seems to be great news! On the other hand this means it will also take a while for the next release... heheh
So congratulations to you all in joining efforts.
I really like the <core>+<gui> approach and I believe in time this will attract more users since everyone can have their favorite GUI.



My 0.09€ on some of the things that were mentioned here (no need to reply, just some food for thought):

- About the name, for me it doesn't matter if the project name changes or not. If the devs are happy, then I'm happy. And although some people don't like aMSN because of the GUI (and associate the name with the tcl/tk GUI)... that will change with time when they see the new interfaces.

- FWIW, in the main page there is still this artifact: <title>Alvaro's Messenger</title> Maybe you will want to update this?

- Possible slogans (if you were looking for one): <aMSN, advancing messaging one step further> or <aMSN, connecting people over closed source paths>

- About the multi client support, and I really *don't* care about this, but if there is a multiprotocol library and its of easy integration and it attracts users (aka pidgyn fanbase).... wouldn't it be worth to spend some time to attract thousands of new users? Hey, maybe that library devs would care to give a hand to aMSN as well?




I don't care about the name, the GUI nor the multiprotocol.
What made me use aMSN was the fact that it has/had the most advanced features, namely ***webcam*** support =)
But I also like very much the "work and feel", that is, the way things work and the small things (e.g. working with UIM for japanese language, being able to check logs, smileys, chat in tabs, etc)

I can't wait for the day when aMSN will support bidireccional synchronized audio-video ;p


Best wishes to all the developers, collaborators and contributers!!!

[kakaroto]

Hi super.long.username,
Thanks for your thoughts (or food for thought :p)
1 - yeah, I don't want to change the name :p
2 - yeah, emesene users/devs told me about this, and I'll change the title of the website to simple 'aMSN  - Open your communication'
3 - hehe, nice slogan, we had a really good one written on the aMSN t-shirts that were made for FOSDEM : "Open your communication".. which is why I thought I'd put that in the website's title...
4 - well.. if someone wants to 'fork' aMSN and implement an interface to libpurple, they are free to do it, that's what open source is all about, right? but I personally think (and many users share that opinion) that we should concentrate on giving the best MSN client ever... having multi proto will just make us loose the focus... read my reply on that other thread, I think it summarizes it well enough.

Yes, we do know that the advanced feature compatibility of aMSN is what draws most of the users... webcam support is our number one feature, and soon, we'll be the first and the number one client with compatible real time audio chat!!
About 'synchronized' audio+video, I have a working branch on the SVN that does that... it only supports receiving for now, but we can receive audio+video correctly and it works great! It uses libao for the audio processing, because no matter what, libsnack is just libcrap... we currently have a google summer of code project for a refactoring of libao and merging it with libao2 (used by mplayer) in order to replace libsnack with a much better library... as well as provide support for audio input. Once it's done, then we can have aMSN send audio too.. the only problem will be video, as it uses WMV3 and there is no open source WMV3 encoder available yet... we use ffmpeg for decoding wmv3 frames and I have a patched version of ffmpeg that does the encoding too, but it's able to encode the first frame then crashes encoding the subsequent frames... the 'bug' is in the fact that there's a missing function for implementing the intra-frames... the frames that only show the "movement" of the image...
But since that code is already available for the decoder it should be fairly easy to do it for the encoder, but we need someone with knowledge of ffmpeg's internals... once we find such a person, it could be a matter of minutes for implementing that...

about aMSN 2, we also currently have a google summer of code working on implementing a MSN webcam conference plugin for farsight 2 and integrating it with pymsn.. yesterday he was able to make pymsn accept a webcam invitation with msnp2p, so he's not too far from implementing that... hopefully by the end of summer, we'll have a working webcam support in pymsn...

p.s.: we'll still keep maintaining aMSN 0.x because we don't want to loose our edge, userbase by falling behind because of amsn2 development....

thanks for commenting

[kakaroto]

Toma posted two messages here, I moved them to this thread : http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5330
@Toma : I'd like to keep the efl discussion in its own thread, so let's talk about it there!

[Mandriva_User]

I've done some work on the Qt 4 front-end today

Check this screencast to view my work so far:
http://85.17.105.113/~wesley/files/amsn_qt4_preview1.ogg

Or have some screenshots, but then you won't see my sweet fade effect :cry:
or the slide effect in the temporarily very ugly contact list :roll:

This is just a test style! If you think it's ugly, don't worry, because by default it will use your system theme
(on Windows, Mac OS X, KDE and GNOME [only from Qt 4.5 or with a backported QGtkStyle])
It will also become themable a bit by using Qt StyleSheets.



Comments are welcome. I prefer positive ones. but negative ones are fine too.

Great!!! I can´t wait for qt4 frontend.