Am I the only one who doesn't see MS Teams on the list?
Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
361–370 of 461 posts
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
a completely different story: when steam engines were replaced with the otto motor and cars became available to the general population, people were able to repair and understand the engines themselves. they had an understanding of mechanical principles. a few generations later, and only car nerds understand cars. everyone else has to go to a mechanic to understand why their car's engine won't start or why it sounds s…
I don't think the point of that "Kids can't use computers" article is that everyone should be technically proficient with computers. Rather, it's an argument against the common misconception that kids have a natural technical proficiency with computers because they grew up with them. The author makes his point pretty clear here: > Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you're twenty-five or…
This reminds me somewhat of people who aren't particularly skilled at math, or are proud of not being particularly skilled at math.
A common refrain is "I'm hopeless with math/numbers".
And to be frank, calculators exist, so as long as you know how to get to the answer you need... I don't think I have a problem with it.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#363Earlier 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
Most of my friends are on stovepiped chat systems now. It's really annoying because chat providers have pretty much stopped providing third party APIs anymore so you have friends spread across Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Tencent, WeChat, iMessage, and whichever chat system Google is using this month. I seriously miss the days when all of them would be in the same app no matter what service they were connected through…
So, aside from Jabber, IRC, and the AIM TOC protocol (which was the weaker version — we used OSCAR, which was not open), we had to reverse-engineer most of the protocols, and keep up-to-date with changes. Often these services actively tried to block us, and we would spend weeks or months working around their changes. Yahoo was notorious for this.
It's not entirely different than the current situation, in that regard, but there was also less security baked in on the older services, and much of the protocols were in plain text.
It's funny. I was just reminiscing about all this a few days ago on Twitter. https://twitter.com/chipx86/status/1352371276464050181
While I'm out of the IM game (gaim?) these days, I'd be very interested in any modern attempts to reverse-engineer these modern services, and whether the pushback from companies would be any different.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did, it resulted in smartphones and tablets, so what the OP is saying applies still. I would argue that's "general" computing now. They finished what the webTV started, providing a basic platform for people who had only very basic needs.
Smartphones and tablets are trying pretty hard not to be general-purpose computers. iOS devices don't run arbitrary user-specified code unless hacked, and many Android devices are designed not to let the user have real admin rights (i.e. root). This seems to be getting worse, for example Google and its financial institution partners have decided that general-purpose computing and payments aren't safe together. Google…
You can use magisk to keep Google pay working on most phones still. (Works on my pixel 5)
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#365Seeing Pidgin on HN brings back good old memories, having used it back in its hey day.
I actually tried it again just a couple of months ago but the main thing I miss is syncing / download of server-side chat history.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#366Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#367Ah! 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…
Oh man, this brings me back. I'm sitting a block away from the old Meebo office right now. I'm still bitter about Google buying out and killing the app.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#368Adium ( https://adium.im/ ) used to be the MacOSX native version (port) of Pidgin. It seems they still recommend it. However, Adium seems kind of dead? Last commit ( https://github.com/adium/adium/ ) was in 2016. I build a MacOSX app bundle for the original Pidgin long time ago ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-macosx/ ). At that point in time, this was not so trivial, as the GTK support for native MacOSX was…
GTK on macOS is completely fine, unless newer versions of GTK have borked it. We use GTK2 for Ardour (cross platform DAW) and there are almost no issues. I did contribute numerous important patches for the quartz backend along the way.
Gtk3 has a Quartz backend and Pidgin 3 will be native on Mac OS. It builds and runs now, but packaging has been a pain so I haven't worked that into our CI yet.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#369Does 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.
I feel so old seeing this. I was using GAIM very shortly after it was publicly released, and basically continued with Pidgin up until AIM died a few years back. I don't use any equivalent nowadays.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
It still works great on the Nokia N900! https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/UsingPidgin/N900
you still use the n900?
All day every day since 2009 :)
I've kept an eye on other phones throughout the years, but nothing quite ticks the same boxes (and by far most things aren't even remotely close).
There are some other interesting phones on the horizon (Librem, PinePhone), but then again things like Maemo Leste are ready to breathe new life into the N900, so I might be using it for very long time yet!