Wednesday, November 28, 2012

JavaScript typed arrays pain

If you’ve ever tried to deal with binary data in JavaScript you know it isn’t much fun and you usually resort to using strings lots of charCodeAt and related functions. Typed arrays are supposed to solve this though! The typed array API consists of creating a buffer of …

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Friday, November 16, 2012

Instantbird 1.3 Released!!!

Well we finally got our release process down a bit better and were able to do a quicker release (from 1.2 to 1.3, compared to our previous few releases). This is great news, as it gives incremental changes to our users faster! There’s some new features available …

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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

On Status

Something that comes up often about Instantbird is why we only support three statuses: Available, Unavailable and Offline. (We do actually support a fourth one too, Idle, but that is set automatically, not chosen by the user.) Frequently this discussion is in the context of wanting an “Invisible” status, but …

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Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Instantbird 1.2 Released (with awesome new IRC features)!

If you haven’t seen the announcement… Instantbird 1.2 has been released! It’s got a ton of great new features that I’m excited for: better tab complete, a marker showing the last viewed messages, support for Bonjour and more. But the most exciting bits to me are …

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Monday, June 11, 2012

IRC Auto-Performs

There have been a few requests to support “auto-performs” (sending commands to the IRC server after connection that the user types into a box or whatever). Personally I find this to be:

  1. A fairly awful user experience.
  2. Confusing to new users.
  3. Unnecessary.

I additionally don’t like this idea since …

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Sunday, January 15, 2012

Instantbird Contact List Hack #2

There was a request on the Instantbird Bugzilla to always show contacts in the contact list as the “big” contact (as shown when a contact is selected). Similarly to my last post, this can easily be done with userChrome.css. See the post if you don’t know what userChrome …

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Monday, October 31, 2011

Instantbird Contact List Hack

A friend of mine asked me if there was a way to have selected contacts in the contact list NOT expand to two lines (where the status goes onto the second line) in Instantbird.

There’s actually no option to do this in Instantbird, but with a little userChrome tweak …

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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Adding a protocol to Instantbird (Part 2)

I had previously talked about adding a protocol to Instantbird, that focused on adding SIPE (Microsoft Office Communicator support). Since then I’ve been slowly working on defeating SIPE. Fortunately I found a few flags that help us compile it easily in Instantbird: we can declare that we do not …

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Saturday, June 18, 2011

Adding a new protocol (SIPE/Office Communicator) to Instantbird (part 1)

Microsoft Office Communicator is an instant messaging client that integrates into the Exchange Messaging Server (the protocol behind it is an extended version of SIP/SIMPLE). Anyway, there’s a libpurple (i.e. the backend of Instantbird and Pidgin) protocol plug-in for OCS (Office Communicator Server) called SIPE. (It’s …

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Monday, May 16, 2011

Compiling Instantbird

In the past I’ve tried to compile a few different programs that use the Mozilla toolkit to various levels of success. I’ve tried to compile Thunderbird, Songbird and Instantbird at various points. I got Thunderbird to compile, but it only worked sporadically (although I think that was Firefox …

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