Where’s the Skype plugin?


So you may be wondering why it’s taken so long for a Skype plugin update for Linux and Windows.  I mean, you probably don’t actually wonder these things since no one reads this blog, but meh 😉

The Adium plugin has been having several updates latetly while the Pidgin plugin gets none.  What gives?  Well, probably the most important thing is that the Adium plugin was sucking CPU power due to a bug in Skype 2.7/2.8 for Mac.  The second reason, was that Adium people were unable to set their status to away or DND or invisible etc… which I can imagine would be quite annoying.  I’m not a mac user myself, so it doesn’t really bother me so much.

The main reason I haven’t put out a Pidgin plugin yet, is I’m mostly waiting for Pidgin 2.6 to come out.  The special, magical thing about Pidgin 2.6 is that it has hooks in it to let people make voice and video calls.  The Skype plugin’s taking advantage of this to use the new “media” menu to make/accept/hang up voice calls… which has several obvious benefits.

Other than that, new features that I’m holding out on are

  • ‘Missed’ messages fetching (eg, if you get a message in Skype while Pidgin was closed/crashed)
  • New chat message handling which should decrease CPU load
  • Better chat handling (easier to add to buddy list, can “get info” on a buddy from the chat window)
  • Probably more, but I can’t remember them 🙂

The other effects of the new features is to get the plugin to work better with the no-Skype-needed version of the plugin.  More about that in another blog post 🙂

So thats it really.  I’m kinda waiting, kinda thinking I should make one last release before Pidgin 2.6…. I’ll think about it some more.  If you want, you can always compile from source or you can ask me nicely and I’ll load up a new dll/so/something 🙂

  1. #1 by Jan on 2009-06-11 - 8:38 pm

    Cool plans. Keep up your good work on the Skype-pidgin-plugin! 🙂

  2. #2 by spatialguru on 2009-07-28 - 10:03 am

    Oh yeah… finally found a way to move to a single IM client 🙂 I couldn’t believe that I found Nimbuzz for my phone that doe Skype (plus other protocols), but been searching this week for a Linux equivalent/replacement. Thanks for encouraging me to give this a try.. I’m holding my breath for the next version. SG

  3. #3 by Hands0fWondr on 2009-09-30 - 12:23 pm

    I’m LOVIN the skype plugin for pidgin. The only thing I can’t wait for is getting the code all set up so ya don’t need skype running at the same time. I’m happy for sure though.. no more windows all over the place. 🙂

  4. #4 by GigaWatt on 2010-01-08 - 8:40 am

    so, uuuumm… when can we be able to download and use the no-skype-needed version of the plugin? will it be any time soon…?

  5. #5 by ZoNi on 2010-04-29 - 11:18 pm

    What is going on with the no-skype-needed version of the plugin?

  6. #6 by Roman on 2010-04-30 - 5:35 pm

    Hi Eion, For some reason the plugin in Pidgin doesn’t connect to my skype account. Just says Could not connect to Skype process, is it running (sure it is). I’m running Pidgin 2.6.6 and Skype 4.2.0.155. Skype gives no warning about a program trying to use it. Please help. I couldn’t find any help on the web. Cheers, Roman

  7. #7 by Ayman on 2010-06-30 - 12:35 am

    Same here Roman – exact same problem?! HELP!

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