There’s now a new Steam app for mobile devices that’s currently in limited beta. The best part about the new app is that it allows you to chat on Steam Friends, without using a Steam client, which means a Pidgin/Adium plugin is more likely to be on its way. The second best part is that you can be logged into the mobile client at the same time as being logged into the desktop, so signing into this mythical Pidgin plugin wouldn’t sign you out on your desktop machine.
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. 🙂
Edit: The Steam plugin for Pidgin has been connecting to the mobile API for a while now; Steam no longer needs to be running to be able to chat with your friends 🙂
#1 by onny on 2012-04-30 - 9:17 am
Hey, thanks for your work on the pidgin plugin. Unfortunately it’s not well documented yet. So where do I have to put the .so file in Linux? In /usr/lib/purple-2 or /usr/lib/pidgin? It would be also nice if you could provide a Makefile in the plugin source. Do you know Vapor Steamclient? This program is a chat client for Steam friends and it uses the native steam protocol for it (not the web-api). Anyway, I Flattr’ed you work : https://flattr.com/thing/427265/EionRobb-on-Twitter 🙂
#2 by Eion Robb on 2012-04-30 - 9:21 am
You’d normally put the plugin in either the /usr/lib/purple-2 folder or your ~/.purple/plugins folder. You’ll need libjson-glib for the plugin to work. Yes, I’ve seen the Vapor client. Unfortunately it’s written in C# so the code can’t be used in Pidgin/libpurple. Using its engine (SteamKit) would also cause you to be logged out of Steam on your machine, whereas using the mobile api you can be logged in from multiple sources. Thanks for the Flattr! 🙂