221–230 of 461 posts
It's cool to do a refresh but please bring the screenshots back and write a bit more about it on the about page - it's empty right now!
Bummer, can't even remember my old logins. Not ICQ nor MSN, Jabber on Facebook doesn't work any longer, might be able to figure out the Yahoo, hmm.
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I re-read that piece just a week ago. It's magnificent and now even more true than eight years ago. Spoke to friend this week, she told me she doesn't have a computer. That's increasingly common. People get by with their phones.
But smartphone is a computer, personal computer with telephony hardware. And Android is Linux with different userspace, mainline Linux can boot quite a lot of smartphones. Terminology is so wrong.
A lot of this has to do with the ecosystem and how a device is presented and what the UX is like. Manufacturers increasingly want to lock things down and hide them away.
I agree that this trend should be fought.
Ah! the glorious days of integrated chat clients. I had friends of MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk and for a very limited time ICQ (Actually it was the same guys on all networks :) ). There weren't any network effort, people were willing to try out different IMs for their uniqueness. Lots of companies were trying to produce integrated chat clients - Pidgin, Meebo, Trillian, Digsby and a whole lot of guys on Mob…
Meebo too, back in high school we'd play cat and mouse with Meebo Repeater, and a few other fun sites (an image board for our school, a really rough freeware proxy) with the IT guys. All run out of old pcs we had in our closests. Highlight was when they redirected the free url we were using to Barney.com
Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.
Does not everyone still use it? I and most of my friends do. They are also responsible for my favorite bug report ever: https://bugs.gentoo.org/35890
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I would suggest they never knew how to use computers. Computers are general purpose devices, which is lost on the general population who only ever need to check emails and post on social media. Smart phones fit this perfectly. Let's leave the general computing devices for people who actually need that power, just like the early days.
Awfully condescending opinion. How about making _general_ computing devices more accessible via UI/UX to the _general_ public? That doesn't seem like such a crazy idea.
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And GAIM was based on Gamera, the official AOL Linux client.
I don't think so - I believe the original GAIM client used the open TOC protocol, e.g. from TiK which was the official Tk-based AIM client, some years before Gamera.
Pidgin and libpurple also have roots in another project called Everybuddy which was one of the first multi-protocol integrated free software chat clients. As I recall, Torrey Searle started Everybuddy because he was having a hard time getting traction on adding multiple protocols to GAIM at the time for a variety of reasons my hazy memory doesn't really remember.
For a couple of years after GAIM started to get plugin and multiple protocol support, much code was shared between GAIM and Everybuddy, and then eventually effort centered around just one of the code bases which eventually became Pidgin and libpurple.
Source: I was involved in GAIM early on and Torrey is a friend from those days.
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Google Talk* There was no product named Google Chat until recently.
Doesn't matter what the official name was, what everyone called it was GChat or Google Chat.