Thanks for sending Synapse off to a great start!
I’d like to extend huge thanks to the hundreds and hundreds of people who have showed interested in Synapse these first few weeks. This project is a huge undertaking, and all the support really means a lot.
I’ve read every tweet and nearly every comment on Reddit, Lifehacker, and other blogs, and the message is clear: the world is ready for better Linux software, and a better instant messenger. People are encouraged by Synapse and looking forward to it’s future. No pressure, right?
Huge HUGE thanks to everyone who has reported bugs, helped with troubleshooting/triaging, and shared their feedback in the conference room and on the forums. Synapse is still an alpha product so there have been plenty of problems, and quite frankly I’ve been a bit overwhelmed :). All the help has been great.
Lots of bugs have already been fixed including better icon support when running under KDE, support for proxy servers, and eliminating many many crashes.
![[Screenshot]](http://synapse.im/images/screenshots/synapse-editaccount-proxy-socks5.png)
The first user-contributed plugin was just merged in, adding preview for wikipedia urls (Thanks goto!):
You can also now add multiple accounts, just note support for this is still a bit rough around the edges.
So what’s next? First I’d like to make absolute sure that nobody will find Synapse less useful than other open-source products. In addition to fixing all the open bugs in the tracker, the plan for this week is to focus on implementing two major features:
- Logging and a conversation history browser.
- Linked Accounts aka transports/gateways. This will make it possible to communicate with friends on other networks, so if you’ve been holding off on switching to Synapse because most of your friends haven’t switched to XMPP yet, hang tight!
I’d also like to add official packages for other distributions very soon, starting with openSUSE and Foresight. If you can help with either of these, please let me know! Big thanks to trontonic for working on ArchLinux support.
There’s been great international interest in Synapse as well. So far members of the community have offered to translate Synapse into Russian, French, Italian, Ukrainian, and German… so making Synapse translatable will be a major short-term goal as well.
Once all this low hanging fruit is taken care of, we’ll be switching gears back to new innovative features. We’ve got a few things in mind, and would love to hear your ideas on the forums.
Challenging the status-quo is never easy. If you’re looking for a fun and exciting project with tremendous potential to get involved with, I hope you’ll consider joining us and help make the vision reality.
Categorized as Open Source, Mono, Open Source, Other, Technology, Software Development, Open Source, Synapse, Technology
Best of luck!
I personally wasn’t impressed with QGtkStyle’s buggy imitation, and it seems like the main synapse window has a mind of it’s own on which theme is better.
So I’m sticking to gtk+ stuff. Although the intent is appreciated :)
Great to hear you haven’t lost interest, a problem with a lot of FOSS projects. I’ll admit I’m still using Pidgin, but that’s only because Synapse has a habit if disappearing from my notification area and I’ve yet to try to track down the issue. Keep up the good work.
Congrats on making so much progress! Does this mean we’ll get to chat with friends from AIM using Synapse soon?
Also, I was wondering about the sidebar of this blog, the “Find me Elsewhere” column. Is that a plugin/widget or did you write it yourself? I really want something like that for my own blog…
Please consider adding support for Laconica and identi.ca. identi.ca, at http://identi.ca/, is like Twitter, but much more in line with Synapse because it’s Free software/Open Source. You could say identi.ca is to Twitter what Synapse is to Windows Messenger.
identi.ca has a Twitter compatible API. That means that all you have to do is to change the URL of the Twitter API to the identi.ca API URL, and all your existing code for Twitter will work with identi.ca! You can read more about that here: http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/TwitterCompatibleAPI For inspiration you can find a list of clients and services that works with identi.ca (and some of which can post to Twitter and identi.ca simultaneously) at http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/Apps. Synapse will of course be added to this list if you decide to support identi.ca.
Laconica, at http://laconi.ca/, is the code that identi.ca runs, and anyone can install it on their own server, like Leo Laporte’s very popular podcasting network TWiT has done with http://army.twit.tv/. The only thing you need to do to add support for any installation of Laconica, instead of just identi.ca, is to let the user herself tell Synapse the URL of the API. For an example just look at how http://twitterfeed.com does it.
Thanks!
Vadim: I’m very surprised that you find QGtkStyle to be buggy, I’ve found it to be nearly flawless. What GTK theme are you using?
dbeta: There was a (hilarious) bug causing Synapse to quit when all windows were closed, this has now been fixed.
Mimzy: Yes! You’ll be able to chat with AIM friends soon. As far as the “Find Me Elsewhere” thing on this blog, it’s actually part of this theme. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/08/agregado-a-free-wordpress-theme/ I hope someone can rip it out into a plugin that’ll work with other themes too.
Børge: Identi.ca/Laconica has been a frequently requested feature. I recommend subscribing to the bug to keep up to date http://firerabbit.lighthouseapp.com/projects/23238/tickets/58-support-identica
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
+1 to Vadim – i think that for synapse will be better use theme of main window
For example if you have brown theme (default in ubuntu) it looks strange when you have dark(black) main window and brown message window…
Thanks!
Thank you!
Ever since I left Miranda behind I was looking for an application to drop-in replace MirandaIM. Stumbled upon a lot of IMs, I think I don’t lie if I say I tried em all.
But this project, wow!
Cpl o days of age, and I know it will advance to my absolute favorite as soon as development catches up a little.
Keep goin, very nice piece of code this is, for sure!
The only thing that still keeps me stuck to crapgin is ICQ.
Strange, but it seems like in Germany, and exclusively in Germany, everybody uses ICQ. I only got 2 contacts on msn, and like 300 or so on ICQ.
However, I’m really looking forward to anything to come.
<<>>
Dead on!
I’d have proposed to contribute german translation, but I guess I’m a little late… Actually I prefer English anyway as it’s more common for applications/tasks in general.
However, thx, thX, tHX, THX and keep going.
Just for congratulate your amazing work. I think this application can make people leave MSN (in france everybody use msn) and join jabber.
Hope you keep working on it. I already use it like my principal Jabber client.
ThX a lot.
Hi, Eric. Since you used your project QyotoDevelop to successfully build Synapse, I have a question about the former. When I work on a QyotoDevelop project and add any widget to my window ui file with the Qt 4 designer, the code generated in the window contains the following line:
this.AddWidget(myButton);
Unfortunately MonoDevelor fails to compile it complaining that the window does not have a method called “AddWidget”. My Qyoto version is 4.4, installed from the built-in packages in Ubuntu 9.04. My Mono version is 2.4.2.3, installed from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~directhex/+archive/monoxide. I’d like to ask you what the problem be. Thank you for your time and good luck with “Synapse”.
Hi Eric !
Im so happy to see a serious XMPP IM project.
We have to unify the IM protocol to replace the pstn network asap. The only way to do that is to focus only on xmpp. Do not waste any time in other propietary network protocol nor propietary operating system Mac/Win
If you succeed, we will succeed !
Thanks a lot! Best wishes!