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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)

#51
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

Thank you for all of the work on Pidgin over the years.

You're very welcome, thanks for using it!

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

#52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

even then it'd be open source so people could just write their own versions

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

#54
post #12

Eion Robb has done an incredible amount of work in this space. His GitHub page[1] has tons of plugins, and I particularly appreciate the work he has done on the Matrix plugin to make it available to Windows users. Lest you think this is less than cool because you don't use Pidgin, bitlbee[2] is a great tool to get slack (and others!) into your IRC client. I haven't run it myself, but I know that it heavily relies on…

> I particularly appreciate the work he has done on the Matrix plugin to make it available to Windows users. I am horrified yet morbidly curious how an IM protocol plugin ended up being OS-specific in the first place o_O?

The protocol is far from being os-specific, but it does call for a lot of crypto facilities calls, which if you're not careful you might end up making os-specific.

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

#55

With the rate of feature change in Teams I'd be afraid to use something like this. I have a hard enough time trusting the official client to work! Beeper was working on a Teams bridge but threw in a towel for, as I understand it, similar reasons.

There's user interface stability and then there's API stability. To backend API is probably much more stable so that the front end has something to lean on when it does all of its changes.

From what i could tell about 2 years ago, if you stuck to the skype (for business) API you would get functionnal messaging and maybe calls, but anything beyond sending and recieving messages (basically anything that you couldn't find in a skype for business client) would break and break often.

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

#56
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.

Early teams was fully compatible with skype for business, they were 2 front ends for the same API. The API has changed a lot since then but the very basic things are still skype-themed

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The optimist thinks the glass is half full

The pessimist thinks it's half empty

Microsoft excel thinks the glass is January 2nd

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

#58

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.

Aren't designers also responsible for the designs of the most pleasant GUI apps we ever use?

It seems like the real problem has to be deeper, having to do with upstream business demands or fashion trends among UI designers pushing designs from their original contexts into contexts where they no longer make sense.

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

#59
If there were ever two apps I had the opposite feelings about, they're Pidgin and Teams.

I loved Pidgin when I was a kid, and really admired its developers. I remember it as a reliable, flexible, unobtrusive, lightweight app that simplified my life. If I could run Pidgin instead of Teams at work, I would be so, so happy.

I don't want most of Teams' embedded Office widgets. I'd rather use the full fat Office apps, or the web browser versions, where at least I can hack in my own 'dark mode' to help with contrast issues I have.

I can't think of anything built into Teams which I don't remember Pidgin having that I would not gladly give up.

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