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Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

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Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#291

Post by asveikau »

jdlyga wrote: post #49

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.

As gaim it was indepensible to someone like me at the time, a late 90s american teenager exploring Linux.

But new, younger people are coming up every day and not all of them are up on the old hits. AIM is totally dead, and even some of the other protocols you might use pidgin for, like standard xmpp, as I used to do with pidgin and gtalk, are not as relevant as they were before.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#292

Post by ayewo »

dheera wrote: post #241
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh damn, Pidgin. I LOVED that app. 15 years ago I had ONE messaging app that logged me into MSN, ICQ, QQ, Zephyr, Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, Facebook, and Renren. On that one messaging app I had either written or downloaded plugins for: * End-to-end encryption (receiver needed the plugin as well) * Automatic two-way human language translation via online translation APIs so I could have a conversation with someone who didn't…

Pidgin was an excellent IM tool particularly on Linux desktops, but there were numerous times when I'm at someone else's computer and a web-based IM client like Meebo came in handy.

http://meebo.com/

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#293

Post by lxgr »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #124
lxgr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This (and Signal now replacing the cryptographically shattered iMessage) is probably the main reason I'm switching to Android Android seems to be headed the opposite direction from Apple when it comes to background service execution and network connectivity. I wouldn't be surprised if background network connections are the next thing to go. > which means that federated stuff is basically out without providing your…

Android is heading in the same direction with GCM.

Exactly, maybe I was unclear: Apple has been adding more and more background execution modes to iOS over the years, while Google has been steadily removing them from Android (and nudging developers towards GCM instead).

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#294

Post by Evidlo »

teawrecks wrote: post #152
superkuh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids can't use computers. http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...

"She reevaluated her categorisation of me. Rather than being some faceless, keyboard tapping, socially inept, sexually inexperienced network monkey, she now saw me as a colleague. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She'd be quite happy to ignore them all, joke about them behind their backs and snigger at them to their faces, but she knows that when she can't display her PowerPoint on the IWB s…

I think the guy is married with kids.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#295

Post by jbverschoor »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #194
jbverschoor wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain point some services didn't work anymore, or not fully feature full. So yeah, ditched it

I wouldn't be surprised that is how they lost the majority of their user base. Everyone I know was on it, myself included, but once support was hampered around the time the AIM protocol died, most people around me left for Telegram and Signal.

I dunno.. I guess I just follow what people use...

IRC

ICQ

MSN

Yahoo messenger for some people in japan

Whatsapp, but noboday was there haha

Whastapp, some people there

FB Messenger

iMessage, but bugs with normals SMS, so disabled it

Google talk.. used by some, but I like to de-google a bit.

Back to whatsapp

kakaotalk, line, and wechat for research / gaming

Telegram. don't like it at all

Signal. kind of buggy

So in the end, I'm using whatsapp ads it's still ubiquitous here, and it's one of the most secure platforms.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#296

Post by majormajor »

feanaro wrote: post #223
sergeykish wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a general purpose computer under there but most people don't interact with it like that. The fact that it can does not mean that it will. 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.

That's been true since 1984 (and whenever Windows caught up ;) ). The enthusiast/hobbyist sector has long been a small minority of the computer buying public.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#298

Post by kop316 »

kop316 wrote: post #115

While I really like Pidgin, I really wish their developer reference for plugins were a bit easier to work with/understand. The only thing I find is here: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/CHowTo (Their new website https://pidgin.im/development/ has nothing on making plugins) But it does not explain things like How to create new chats/IMs, how to create new buddies, what the Buddy List is (Which I found out, the buddy…

EDIT: So I stumbled a bit across this too:

https://pidgin.im/development/faq/

I can say first hand that the info in "How can I create a conversation with someone?" is flat out incorrect. Look here:

https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/blob/master/matr...

Before you create a conversation, you need to add it to the blist (buddy list, which is NOT a list of contacts, but something different). If you don't, pidgin has issues displaying the chat!

https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/blob/master/matr...

BUT, that will immediately SEGFAULT if you don't have functions such as:

https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/blob/master/libm...

https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/blob/master/libm...

And a couple of others. I only found that because the Chatty dev was able to find this.

Even with that, it refuses to remember that you have a chat after closing pidgin. How to fix that? Well that is a great question....as I simply don't know.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#299

Post by CodeGlitch »

octorian wrote: post #271
CodeGlitch wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Let's leave the general computing devices for people who actually need that power, just like the early days. With that attitude, eventually the impact of economies of scale will end up denying us the ability to afford those devices or to use them how we see fit.

We as a family were able to afford an ARM computer (BBC micro) in the 80s.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#300

Post by Macha »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #255
Macha wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was released as a standalone app in 2006 (after having a labs beta period prior) as Google Talk, and integrated into Gmail in 2007. While the widget in Gmail (which was only removed very recently to replace it with a Meet widget!) was labelled Chats, the service itself never was.

I think they're actually referring to Google Hangouts Chat

> chat integrated into Gmail before it was branded Google Talk.

Hangouts chat came wayyyy after Google Talk or even its integration into gmail (I know, it's hard to keep track of the chronology of these Google services, they release 2 new ones a year)

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