Spark 2.0.0beta

Very pretty, works well, still has some mild issues connecting from Mac OS X.  Has sort of become my client of choice at home because Adium X has been very very slow for me lately.  Not sure why.

Things I wish it had:

- Better disco interface.  (I was working on one at one point but got sidetracked)

- Ability to register with/interact with components (see previous as it's related)

- Integration with apple address book for names and meta-contacts

- Meta contacts  ;D

- Apple-W to close a chat tab/window.

- More intelligent Growl support.  (right now it gives you a growl notification for every message, whereas other clients tend to only give you notifications on conversations that you are not currently looking at)

Adium X 1.0b1

My typical client of choice because I adore it's look and feel.  This version has so many things done under the surface that I like, but I won't go into them.  On the surface, the interface looks a tad cleaner and it supports Jabber icons now!!! WOOOO!  Unfortunately, it's rather crashy at the moment, but it's beta.  =)  I've been sending off the reports that come from the reporter tool, but I really don't have anything useful to add to the reports as I'm not sure what's causing the crashes.

Things I wish it had:

- Better Jabber support.  (things like disco, in-band registration, etc)

Psi (private build from SVN tree)

Psi continues and will likely always be my chosen test client.  I believe it supports many things well and is typically the best to test transport changes with (IMO).  Likewise, those guys are going plum crazy with features lately!  =)  Color me very impressed.

Things I wish it had:

- Integration with Apple address book for meta contacts and names.

- Meta-contacts.  ;D  (this is on the roadmap)

Other Stuff

On an unrelated note, this will cause my other posts to actually come through to Planet Jabber.  (I had two pending.... I think serendipity's Atom feed support is not very good, and RSS 2.0 support seems to be good, so I've asked that my feed at planet jabber be switched to RSS 2.0)

Also, due to a project I'm working on that I don't really want to discuss in my blog right now, the python transports and jwgc are in a sort of statis for a little bit.  Shouldn't be long, but just in case you were wondering why there hasn't been more development or a release lately.

Also note that I need to do a few improvements to BlatherCore (see www.blathersource.org) to deal with spam (sigh) and also integrate a couple of other interesting features.  Likewise, need to knock out ScriptRepo and get that bad boy up and running for people to use.  Need to silence the back and forth conversation in my head about how to deal with the various projects and "just do something", you know?  I like the way the interface came out, so hopefully that will encourage me to get it done sooner rather than later.

I have come to the conclusion that something I need to consider doing is writing a very quick and very dirty jabber client.  JWGC is not that client.  JWGC is a little complex and what I'm looking for is something . . . written in a scripting type of language that I know well (python? perl?) . . . that doesn't necessarily need to have a pretty user interface.  The goal here is..  as I'm working on new features for the python transports, I need to not be sitting here going "man, I wish I had a client that supported X feature so I could test it".  Hell with that, why don't I just write one that I can quickly and easily modify on the fly?  There's plenty of good libraries and such out there.  On the python front there's xmpppy which I have already coded one little thing with and it's realllly easy to code client type things with it.  Assuming I don't give a crap about anyone else but me using it, and I don't give a crap about the UI, what's keeping me from doing this?  I'd something that I ought to have done a long time ago.  Doesn't mean I wouldn't make it available for others to play with if they really wanted, but by the same token, since when can't I write something solely for me, where I don't offer or pay attention to bug reports... a "if you want to use this, here it is, if it doesn't work, fix it yourself or move on" software if you will.  Hell, who's to say I even have to make it available?  Sometimes I get stuck in the mentality that everything I do HAS to be done in a public facing manner and forget.