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Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

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Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#21

Post by lotsofpulp »

youainti wrote: post #14
gardenhedge wrote: post #9

I used Pidgin around 15+ years ago. Around the time of MSN messenger. Cool that it is still around although this reminder of it has made me long for the days I would log on to my PC and chat with my friends (IRL and Online). Now I'm more connected than ever - I have everyone I know IRL on WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Instagram - but also never chat to people in the same way. I only chat to people I don't know IRL through…

Wow. I've never noticed it until but yeah, that is how things are for me too.

If you want to connect with people using HN, you should probably put contact info in your HN profile.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#22

Post by hestefisk »

Imagine a chat application with Teams that is actually /usable/. I really miss the days of Pidgin. Fun fact: the KDE / Linux client for MSN had a feature whereby it would notify me (by opening a window) if someone had clicked on my profile in MSN Messenger and started typing a message, but not yet sent it. It was a really nice way of freaking regular MSN Messenger users out.

I cannot remember what the name of the application was but it was very handy.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#23

Post by eyelidlessness »

ecliptik wrote: post #3

There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, you name it. You could even layer on encryption with the OTR plugin, message logging, automation and countless other plugins. At the time I took this for granted and didn't appreciate just how wonderful it was.

Begrudgingly-former Adium (~Mac equivalent of Pidgin) user here: it was glorious indeed!

I didn’t take it for granted because I had already been using the prior iteration of incompatible chat apps soup, and I clung to it far longer than most reasonable people would as it became a ghost town on supported protocols.

The biggest exodus at the time (from my perspective) was when Google closed up whatever their current branded chat service was. But the real nail in the coffin (again from my perspective) was Slack, for the fairly obvious reasons that chat is their primary product and active/paying users is their primary product. Of course the rise of other chat-first apps successful with the youngs, and well positioned instant incumbents from social media, the coffin had many nails.

But it really is a shame this era came to an end. I don’t know how it could have gone differently given the incentives and circumstances, but I’d go back to those tradeoffs (basically everything works in one native app where I can talk to anyone I know however I want to, but probably direct file transfers are gonna fail most of the time) in a heartbeat.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#24

Post by userbinator »

Aeolun wrote: post #17

How does this even work? I’ve never managed to penetrate the MS API’s for chat, and as far as I’d found it’s impossible without apps installed by your workplace admin.

It just does the same things the official client does. The fact that it's a REST API makes inspecting the traffic relatively easy, although that trades off efficiency compared to the custom protocols that a lot of early IM clients used.

Note that the resemblance to Skype (and even references to Skype in the source code) are not coincidences; Teams is AFAIK largely based on the same backend as MS-Skype.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#25

Post by chipx86 »

userbinator wrote: post #19
chipx86 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work on Gaim/Pidgin (and in fact created libgaim/libpurple) back in my college days. It was easier for us to build and maintain back then. We had push-back from some of the companies (Yahoo being notoriously aggressive about it, to the point of actively banning our developers' accounts and inventing new obfuscated auth schemes all the time), but from a technical standpoint: 1. Most of these were communicati…

The protocols were generally understandable (MSN for a long time was largely all MIME-based messages, and could be understood by watching a traffic stream) Microsoft even submitted an early draft of MSNP to the IETF. I'd consider (at least the early versions) MSNP the next step up in complexity from IRC, i.e. you can write a working client with both presence and messaging within a day or two. This is from experience…

Very cool! Which client did you write?

I had forgotten they tried to standardize the protocol!

Yeah, it was surprisingly easy. Connect to the switchboard server, set up sessions from there, and then it's all MIME. We even implemented avatars for Gaim by chunking Base64-encoded images over MIME messages (they had a max length), which MSN would ignore but Gaim would use.

We never had any trouble from the MSN team. Rumor had it at the time that at least one dev on the team was secretly a Gaim user, and they just looked the other way.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#26

Post by netsharc »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #5
ecliptik wrote: post #3

There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, you name it. You could even layer on encryption with the OTR plugin, message logging, automation and countless other plugins. At the time I took this for granted and didn't appreciate just how wonderful it was.

With TTS and STT it felt like a super power

On the topic of super powers, I remember using a Pidgin plug-in that would pop-up a chat window if someone is typing a message for you, even before they sent their first message. That's because their client was sending a "User is typing..." signal. The plug-in would notice this signal, open the chat window and notify you with the sentence "You feel a disturbance in the force..."

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#27

Post by userbinator »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #10

I'll run this if only so I can have multiple DMs side by side in very small windows. Not sure why the Teams people are so resistant to having that.

One word: Designers.

They currently seem to love the "hieroglyphic controls floating in a sea-of-whitespace(or blackspace)" trend.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#28

Post by eyelidlessness »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #21
youainti wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I've never noticed it until but yeah, that is how things are for me too.

If you want to connect with people using HN, you should probably put contact info in your HN profile.

I generally just include a note about how easy it is to find my contact info in comments where contact would be welcome. I’m often surprised that some people bite.

Other times people have intuited this without me explicitly saying so. To credit the HN community, these surprise off-site contacts have been 100% positive so far. (I really hope I didn’t jinx that with this comment.)

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#29

Post by tim-- »

hestefisk wrote: post #22

Imagine a chat application with Teams that is actually /usable/. I really miss the days of Pidgin. Fun fact: the KDE / Linux client for MSN had a feature whereby it would notify me (by opening a window) if someone had clicked on my profile in MSN Messenger and started typing a message, but not yet sent it. It was a really nice way of freaking regular MSN Messenger users out. I cannot remember what the name of the app…

There were a bunch of apps back in the day that could hook into MSN Messenger to provide a whole bunch of functionality like this. It could tell you when people closed their chat windows.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#30

Post by kaetemi »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #10

I'll run this if only so I can have multiple DMs side by side in very small windows. Not sure why the Teams people are so resistant to having that.

Teams would use 1GB RAM for each DM window if they did that.

And the download button when someone sends you a file would still not work.

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