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Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

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Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#91

Post by wjt »

bergie wrote: post #82
mdasen wrote: post #7

I really miss Adium ( https://adium.im ) which was based on Pidgin's libpurple. Adium had such a great user experience. It was built with native widgets and also incorporated chat themes that were implemented using WebKit's rendering ( https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=... ). It was fast and memory friendly given that it was a native app and the themes were just small templates offering a di…

The messaging app on the Nokia N900 was also based on libpurple. You had all of your Google Talk and Skype contacts and chats, together with SMS in a single place.

It was based on Telepathy https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/. None of the built-in backends for XMPP, SIP, Skype and cellular calls used libpurple. (A libpurple-based backend could be installed from the community app repo.)

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#92

Post by lousken »

After ICQ and QIP, Trillian was the way to go for me. Unfortunately the inability to use facebook without being constantly banned forced me to switch to Element. And while Element and Matrix is cool, it still doesn't come close to Trillian. Emotes are not customizable, theming is harder, and the amount of things u can do with history is endless compared to Element. Overall I feel like Element is more like Teams and missing features for power users. The search functionality and working with many attachments in element is very tedious, no way to search in them, sort them, filter them... I hope they can improve on that, I have over 500k messages and history feels useless thanks to that.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#93

Post by sequoia »

Q: What happened to Pidgin? A: Google & Facebook shut down their XMPP gateways to force you into their apps. All the sudden you can no longer use Pidgin to communicate with people on google & facebook. At least that was my experience.

I used to use Pidgin with OTR[0] for e2e encrypted chat over google & facebook. It was pretty fantastic, messages were inaccessible to facebook and google even with a court order so I didn't need to trust them.

Also used Finch for a bit[1]. For a time I had a pretty great setup on a local VM (running the PHP app I was working on): one tmux tab with work, another with a pane for finch (for chatting on FB & google), a pane for IRC, and a third pane for ttytter[2], the amazing twitter CLI. If someone nontechnical walked by they'd see a terminal and it looked exactly like I was working, not chatting on IRC & facebook, and looking at twitter :D

0: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ 1: https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-finch/ 2: https://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#95

Post by paulryanrogers »

sequoia wrote: post #93

Q: What happened to Pidgin? A: Google & Facebook shut down their XMPP gateways to force you into their apps. All the sudden you can no longer use Pidgin to communicate with people on google & facebook. At least that was my experience. I used to use Pidgin with OTR[0] for e2e encrypted chat over google & facebook. It was pretty fantastic, messages were inaccessible to facebook and google even with a court order so I d…

Plus one for OTR. It was a bit awkward to do key exchange and validation but otherwise great once set.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#96

Post by khc »

chipx86 wrote: post #88
forty wrote: post #64

Aaah I used it a long time ago, it was then called Gaim I believe. I also used the similarly named but jabber only Gajim. Good times :)

Indeed. Originally it was "GAIM" (due to the original purpose being a GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger client), which AOL wasn't thrilled about. We changed it to "Gaim", which I think they had less of a problem with, or at least we had hoped they would. Internally at least, we called it "Gaim's An Instant Messenger". I'm not sure if we formalized that or not. It's been too long. And then to fully move away from that brandi…

Hi chipx86! I remember "Gaim's An Instant Messenger" used to be on the old website but either google or my memory is failing me.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#97

Post by Kye »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #85
mdasen wrote: post #7

I really miss Adium ( https://adium.im ) which was based on Pidgin's libpurple. Adium had such a great user experience. It was built with native widgets and also incorporated chat themes that were implemented using WebKit's rendering ( https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=... ). It was fast and memory friendly given that it was a native app and the themes were just small templates offering a di…

The ironic thing is the protocols are now almost all dirt simple but I perceive the risk of being C&D’d for making alternative clients to not be worth the risk.

AOL definitely took issue with gaim, which was Pidgin's old name from when it was mainly an AIM client.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispu...

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#98

Post by egypturnash »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #39
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see what Adium's interface actually looked like, but apparently the website does not believe in screenshots. :(

One of the non-obvious parts of Adium's interface from the screenshots was that it integrated with Mac OS's calendar app, so I could have a contact "John Smith" and enter his AIM name, his Yahoo name, etc and they'd all show up as "John Smith" and be collapsed into one entry in your contact list. On top of that, Adium is/was also incredibly themable. You could use independent Adium Xtra addons for both your contact l…

I'm using a Mac and I definitely miss Adium.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#99

Post by qiskit »

valbaca wrote: post #2

oh pidgin. Throughout my life (as a millennial) chat went this way: 1. IRC 2. IRC, Yahoo messenger, Aol Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger (mostly based on your ISP in the early days) 3. All + Skype (video!! wow!) + Google messenger. *This was when pidgin was invaluable* (there was also some Duck app for macOS?) 4. Skype started charging and since everyone was on Facebook, everyone moved to Facebook messenger. Text mes…

No icq? There was a time when the first thing you installed on your computer was instant messaging applications. It's how you kept in touch with friends online. Crazy how quickly it fell off.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#100

Post by chipx86 »

khc wrote: post #96
chipx86 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Originally it was "GAIM" (due to the original purpose being a GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger client), which AOL wasn't thrilled about. We changed it to "Gaim", which I think they had less of a problem with, or at least we had hoped they would. Internally at least, we called it "Gaim's An Instant Messenger". I'm not sure if we formalized that or not. It's been too long. And then to fully move away from that brandi…

Hi chipx86! I remember "Gaim's An Instant Messenger" used to be on the old website but either google or my memory is failing me.

Hi! Yep, I think you're right :) That sparks a memory.
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