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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)

#41

Post by eyelidlessness »

rw_grim wrote: post #33
eyelidlessness wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

You may be interested to know that Pidgin 3 is targeting macOS natively. We don't have a release date yet, but we are inching closer and closer to an alpha which I've written a blog post about what we're targeting with it. Yes this is on patreon but it's public https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-were-with-3-78291546

What the what?! You’re damn right I’m interested to know.

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

#42

Post by mindcrime »

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.

I still use Pidgin regularly to this very day. Of course I only really use it for XMPP, but I did actually configure it to connect to my old ICQ account a while back. Unfortunately is seems to have quit working sometime or other. Think I'm being bit by this:

https://github.com/EionRobb/icyque/issues/27

No big loss, I think there was like 1 other person in my ICQ contacts list that was still showing as online every now and then. Still, it's a neat nostalgia indulgence to connect to ICQ after all these years...

EDIT: I rebuilt icyque from the latest sources and it appears that I can once again enjoy the wonderful world of ICQ!

If anybody wants to chat, I'm 17109168 on ICQ.

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

#43

Post by userbinator »

chipx86 wrote: post #25
userbinator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Rumo…

I never released it, as there were plenty of others already available at the time. It was written in pure Win32, and a single portable .exe of We never had any trouble from the MSN team.

Judging by the huge number of other thirdparty clients, I don't think Microsoft bothered to do anything about them, and almost treated it like they did Windows piracy --- they would rather you use a thirdparty client with MSN than a competitor's network; I suspect the fact that this was also not long after their antitrust lawsuit also had some influence.

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

#44

Post by rw_grim »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #41
rw_grim wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be interested to know that Pidgin 3 is targeting macOS natively. We don't have a release date yet, but we are inching closer and closer to an alpha which I've written a blog post about what we're targeting with it. Yes this is on patreon but it's public https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-were-with-3-78291546

What the what?! You’re damn right I’m interested to know.

You might also be interested in my State of the Bird presentations as well that happen quarterly. https://pidgin.im/posts/2023-01-state-of-the-bird-2022-q4/

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

#45

Post by userbinator »

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…

A lot of thirdparty clients did that, and it's a natural consequence of the protocol relying on creating sessions (ephemeral chat rooms is a good description of what they're like), which its participant(s) are notified of being added to prior to the first message being sent; but the official client just keeps track of the session creations and doesn't actually indicate any activity in a session until a message is sent.

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

#46

Post by grishka »

corndoge wrote: post #32
eyelidlessness wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

Matrix is working on bringing that world back, and works pretty well, although configuring a homeserver with the necessary bridges is more difficult than pidgin was.

And there's still not a single decent Matrix client for macOS. Best case you get some ugly-ass QT thing that doesn't work anything like a macOS app would. The official and most featureful Matrix client is even worse than that, it's an electron app, ugh.

The Matrix protocol itself sometimes also leaves much to be desired. It's much more modern than XMPP, that's true, but the fact that you can't send an image with text in a single message is just... How did everyone involved decide that it's reasonable? Did people design the UX on top of a protocol when it should always be done the other way around?

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

#47

Post by simula67 »

chipx86 wrote: post #18
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.

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…

Have you ever considered writing a new protocol and create a network only for Pidgin users?

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

#48

Post by liketochill »

CrazyPyroLinux wrote: post #15
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.

Every MS product (except for maybe VSCode and latest .NET) feels like Gates and Ballmer are still there saying "whatever - you'll have to use this because your $BIGCORP bought it from our salespeople!"

Excel is still pretty good

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

#49

Post by corndoge »

rw_grim wrote: post #34
corndoge wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is working on bringing that world back, and works pretty well, although configuring a homeserver with the necessary bridges is more difficult than pidgin was.

We're still here!! And there's a ton of support for stuff via third party protocols. I know it's not ideal, but things will get easier when Pidgin 3 finally gets closer to a release. See this page for a list of all the third party protocol support https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...

Great to hear it's alive and kicking!

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

#50

Post by smt88 »

simula67 wrote: post #47
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…

Have you ever considered writing a new protocol and create a network only for Pidgin users?

That seems antithetical to the mission of libpurple. There are already a million messengers and protocols, including excellent FOSS ones.
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