Let me know if you’re in the beta at the moment (ie, have you managed to sign into Steam from your mobile) as I’d be keen to hear your experiences with it.

If you’re using winpidgin, I’d suggest you download and enable the pidgin-win32-non-bmp plugin to prevent remote crashes.

I just have a couple of things to catch up on, a massively overgrown garden to tame and a month-long honeymoon coming up, but other than that I’m really to roll up my sleeves and get coding.

So, what do you want to see fixed/updated/changed next?

The backup I had also didn’t have my last blog post in it, so I had to recreate it from a Google cache backup.

In case you didn’t know the Christchurch earthquakes have been affecting my life for the past few months. These are pics from a walk around the block around my house. Over 7000 aftershocks and still going!

So what does this mean for the Pidgin plugins?
For the most part, not a great deal. Things have slowed down since I’m spending more time of earthquake cleanup and wedding planning rather than coding, but they’re still plodding along. Unfortunately the power-cuts and brown-outs have caused damage to the server machine that I use to build all my plugins (and which runs this website/blog) and it needs to be rebuilt. Currently it’s running of a live CD of Gentoo since the main partition won’t mount at boot. If you’ve been unable to access the Skype plugin site recently, that’s why.

So what’s the state of the Skype plugin?
As mentioned in previous posts, I had started work on a SkypeKit plugin. Unfortunately, the terms and conditions completely rule out using the SkypeKit SDK in open-source software and so the SkypeKit protocol would need to be clean-room reverse engineered – this has been made harder by the added layers of encryption recently added to the SkypeKit protocol. Instead, I’ve been following closely the skype-open-source efforts, to create a native Skype protocol plugin for Pidgin, however a lot of people have been having difficulty with it as certificates and other protocol things are out of date with the newest Skype versions. For now, I recommend just using an old version of Skype (eg, v3 or v4 on Windows) along with the skype4pidgin plugin, to keep memory usage down.

So what’s the state of the Facebook plugin?
Well at the moment, there’s a lot of people having a lot of trouble with the plugin. Things have changed in the ‘FB HTTP’ protocol and I haven’t had a chance to do anything about it. Unfortunately, Pidgin (well, libpurple mainly) can’t just switch over to using the official FB API’s for login and status messages and stuff since it all relies on having a browser being embedded into the app. It also relies on the browser supporting JavaScript, something which especially can’t be assumed when using Finch from a terminal. There’s some code in source control at the moment that uses the login system from the HTTP chat method to allow the Pidgin app to do the XMPP login and all that jazz without any kind of user interaction, but that probably breaks a lot of FB terms and conditions.

What about the other plugins?
Yeah, I write one or two other plugins for Pidgin/libpurple A lot of them are being integrated into the Purple Plugin Pack but I’ll list them out here with a brief status update:

• OkCupid protocol plugin: Still going strong. I’ve been asked to port the plugin to work in InstantBird which I’ve started investigating.
• Windows 7 Extensions plugin: Looking good. If you’re using Windows 7 or later and don’t have the plugin, you’re missing out on some useful eye-candy
• Automatic translation plugin: Not so hot. The calls to the Bing/Microsoft Translate service are all coming back as null, and the Google Translate API’s are closing up at the end of the year. I’m looking at other (free) online services to use.
• Steam protocol plugin: There’s now a SteamKit library out which talks the native Steam protocol. Unfortunately it’s written in .NET and would either need a complete rewrite to work in Pidgin, or for a Pidgin plugin to be written using embedded mono. Writing OO code in C is crazy
• Keyboard LED notification: Not working on this any more since it works well for most people
• Protocol Icon Override: Has an annoying bug that the icons don’t show up when creating a new account, otherwise fine
• IRC HTML Formatting: Oddly needs to be re-enabled after Pidgin starts, and it’s currently not matching up HTML colour codes to their closest-match IRC colours. Bold and italics and underline work alright though
• Wordfeud protocol plugin: Most of the protocol is reverse-engineered and chatting works fine, it just needs some kind soul to make a GTK interface for the Wordfeud game board
• Gammu protocol plugin (SMS via your phone): Works fine
• Typing sounds: Why would you even want to use it?
• Omegle protocol plugin: No idea. Let me know if you use this one
• Ning protocol: Also no idea. Again, let me know if you use it
• NetNexus protocol: Unfortunately noone hangs out in the NetNexus rooms any more
• Pidgin Juice: Needs a massive overhaul to take advantage of some new HTML5 goodness.

So yup, that’s an update. While I’m not in the super active development mode I was a year or two ago, I’m still fairly contactable. So if you have any questions, queries, bug reports or feature requests feel free to either contact me, or leave a post in the comments.

Yes, SkypeKit has been announced. A new way to connect to the Skype network. Yes, it still needs a Skype client running, however now that Skype client doesn’t have a user-interface. This new interface allows developers to use more parts of Skype that were previously untouchable, such as native-typing notifications and file transfers, which is a good thing. Sure, its not perfect in a pure open-source world but definitely a step in the right direction.

The bad news is that it’s GPL incompatible and needs a lot more work before a GPL compatible plugin for Pidgin can be made available. Yes, work is in progress.

At the moment, I’m rewriting the plugin to use the new XMPP protocol that Facebook have provided. (You can already start using it yourself if you like but you’ll miss out on features such as larger buddy icons, status messages, notifications, group/friend list management). I’ve been trying to work on it for a while, but due to my fiancée being in hospital for many weeks there’s been a bit of a personal delay

The other thing you, the user can do, is to tweak the hidden settings of the plugin to work around the new security feature. If you close down Pidgin, edit your .purple/accounts.xml file, find your browser’s user-agent, and paste it into your accounts.xml in the line
<setting name=’user-agent’ type=’string’>YourUserAgentHere</setting>
then Facebook will think that your browser is the one you normally use and should let you pass.
The other alternative of course is to disable (or not opt-in to) this new opt-in feature, but that one’s up to you.

1. Better Windows 7 integration.
   Windows 7 has new jumplists and preview panes and that file-transfer progress thing. Skype uses them all on Win7 and it looks pretty nifty. Would love to see that in there
2. SIP protocol plugin
   With the new voice/video API in Pidgin, there’s been a few requests to have SIP (rather than SIMPLE, which is already in Pidgin). There’s a Sophia-SIP prpl at http://sofia-sip.sourceforge.net/ssip-gst.html which would be a great starting point
3. An over-the-net remote control for Pidgin/Finch
   I started working on this one myself with a friend, starting with a web interface for Pidgin to use it with the iPhone, and working on a prpl that would let you remotely sign into, say, your home Pidgin and use it from work, while logging the conversations at home and without signing out of your home accounts. (I should really put the source code for that online sometime)
4. A plugins site a la adiumxtras.com or addons.mozilla.org
   Some kind of plugin that can update other plugins would be handy too. I have a lot of users of various plugins of mine that are using old versions, just because they didn’t know a newer one existed. If there was an autoupdate as well as a single place with all the plugins, that would be super-duper

Anyway, that’s my ideas. Anyone have any others?

1. Create a new XMPP account in your favourite XMPP client, eg Adium or Pidgin
2. Use your Facebook username in the ‘username’ field. If you don’t have a username get one at http://facebook.com/username
3. Use ‘chat.facebook.com’ (without the quotes) in the ‘domain’ field
4. Enter in your password
5. Uncheck the Require SSL/TLS settings
6. Check the ‘Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams’

You should be good to go

So, after a bit of snooping around, I discovered the details of the XMPP servers. You can even (almost) connect to them. For now, it looks like you have to be authorized in their beta programme (or probably just be working at Facebook) to be able to use it.

The XMPP server is running at chat.facebook.com:5222 and it uses DIGEST-MD5 for authentication as well as something called “X-FACEBOOK-PLATFORM” for SASL. In Pidgin you can set up the account by using your username, with the domain chat.facebook.com, disabling the “Require SSL/TLS” option in the advanced tab. Doesn’t look like its working with s2s yet, but hard to tell without being able to log in.

So give it a go, maybe your account slips through the cracks and you can log in. Will been keen to hear from anyone about their successes/failures with this.