This is an extremely exciting concept, and I would be very happy to
help develop a cocoa front end (if you'll have me!). I've already
written some PoC code in the current aMSN2 repo, but I will rewrite
this over the summer, to give a long awaited Cocoa front end for Mac
users.
Hey to all the new developers, I look forward very much to working
with you all! Drawing from all your experience will make our
development team much stronger!
As for the which f/e to support issue, I think this will be long
debated.. It is also a new concept for our current users (who
currently enjoy the same experience x-platform). I think we will need
to support at least one front end "officially", and I'm guessing that
the EFL f/e is the most mature, and so would be a good choice for the
initial releases.
A GTK+ front end will be called for from almost all our Linux users,
and Cocoa from our Mac users, and so I'm sure these will be very
popular in terms of numbers of users, and therefore they will be busy
for support and bugs as well..
I think it is not unreasonable to think that we can support more than
one front end officially, and I think having an "official" download
for their desktop environment is a thing that our users will want...
- Tom
ps. elloquence looks fantastic. A beautiful client there!
On 12 Jun 2008, at 00:46, Youness Alaoui wrote:
Hi All and welcome to a whole new world!
In this email, I will be announcing our current plans for aMSN2,
finally, the veil is coming off and you will all get to look at the
new path we're taking!
I know some of you already know of all this, and some of you were
eagerly waiting for it for a long time. No more rumors.. no more
maybes... here's the deal!
aMSN2 is a total rewrite of aMSN 0.x. It will not be in tcl/tk. For
the greatest pleasure of many of you, we decided that the best
suited programming language for such a project is python!!
So, all python lovers rejoice, and all python haters, sorry, too
bad, live with it!
We didn't want to say anything publicly about aMSN2 to avoid any
kind of flame war or anything like that, we're used to all those
flame wars happening whenever the choice of the language is being
discussed, now, the choice is made, the code is written (partially)
so it is useless to start debating this, so please, refrain from any
useless debate.
Another big issue was the choice of the toolkit.. some people might
prefer gtk, others would like qt... mac users will want a native
cocoa application, and the same goes for windows or whatever toolkit
you can think of... We researched that a lot and trying to choose
wisely which toolkit to use...
We had a list of requirements and were trying to find which toolkit
would answer those requirements the best...
- GTK did not fit the requirement of being able to have a background
image on a text widget (unless doing a lot of hacking and
reimplementing the text widget)...
- QT did not fit the requirement about the performance....
Which one to choose... well, we decided to go with something
completely different : EFL
For those who do not know what it is, the EFL is the Enlightenement
Foundation Libraries. It's a set of libraries that makes building
UIs such a beauty! It only has one.. euhh.. two... humm.. a few
problems :
1 - there are still no releases of the EFL.. so anyone willing to
test this needs to compile the huge set of libraries from CVS
2 - the APIs might change until the libraries are released...
3 - we cannot embed an image inside a text widget.. so no smileys
support...
The first two issues are easily dealt with : we don't care..
anyways, it should be released by the time amsn2 gets finished...
the last one (embeded images/smileys) is resolved with another
solution : use webkit (html engine) for drawing the contact list and
chat window text widgets....
But most importantly, we wanted to create a 3 level design that
would help us have a 'pluggable' front end... allowing the user to
choose which toolkit he wants...
So I am pleased to announce that aMSN2 will be a multi-front-end
application!!!
We currently have an EFL front end, a native cocoa front end for Mac
users, a ncurses front end, and.... a gtk front end!
There might also be someone working on a QT and/or a XUL front end
soon...
We obviously do not want to be maintaining all of those front ends,
so there will be development teams who take care of their own front
ends.. for now, whether the aMSN team will give support for only one
officially chosen front end or to none is still unclear... but I am
proud to announce that :
The GTK front end will be maintained by the emesene developers team!
We had a few discussions with the emesene developers and they were
interested in joining forces with aMSN. We now have 4 new members
who will be joining us in the development of aMSN2 :
Mariano : developer of emesene who wants to work on aMSN2 in general.
Dx : also developer of emesene who wants to work on the gtk front
end and maybe the core/protocol of aMSN2
Jandem : another developer of emsene who is working on the gtk front
end.
Alen : former emesene developer and currently lead developer of the
elloquence messenger client. He wants to work on the gtk front end,
the protocol layer and maybe the EFL front end too.
So this is great news, as you know, emesene is really a beautiful
client that is emerging so fast in the scene, and has become a
growing "competitor" to aMSN in the last months, and having the
emesene team on board is a great honor!
I am also pleased to announce our collaboration with the pymsn
developers (Ali Sabil, Johann Prieur and Ole Andre Vadla Ravnas).
aMSN2 will be using the pymsn library for all the protocol related
work. Pymsn is a greatly designed library that was the first to
implement the MSNP15 protocol and already has the necessary changes
(in a branch) for an MSNP16 implementation. I will join them into
improving the pymsn library so we can have a growing protocol
library that follows aMSN2's features.
Finally, here is a link to a screencast showcasing both the GTK and
the EFL front ends of aMSN2.. Note that for now only the login
screen and contact list are implemented (partially) :
http://www.amsn-project.net/~kakaroto/edje/amsn2-v4.mpeg
I hope you enjoy this video!
You can also have a look at this screencast of Elloquence, the
client being built by Alen, as well as a screenshot of its login
window in the following links :
http://alencool.googlepages.com/elloquenceTest2.avi
http://alencool.googlepages.com/elloquencelogin.png
Or you can run emesene/elloquence to see what aMSN2 might look like
when you choose the gtk front end, once the work is completed.
The source code will soon be added to our public SVN so others can
enjoy it, read the code, and global collaboration can begin!
Thank you! :)
KaKaRoTo
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