Mercury - Sametime Messenger for Mac OS X

Questions...

Ok so I've read a few of the questions that I recieved after releasing 0.3 and here are some answers.

• I am working on text meetings support. It will come soon(TM).
• I am also working on the entire message view system (not just display capabilities) so I will hopefully be rolling out a chat logging feature along with the new message view.

Now for a few questions of my own.

• I'm considering enlisting some help with Mercury, I'm looking for either Java programmers with experience with the Sametime toolkit, or I'm looking for experienced (fairly) Cocoa/Obj-C developers. No someone who might fit? Do you fit? If so contact me at mercury at idavidson dot net, with a short description of your experience.
• I'm not trying to put anyone off, but I'm currently having to consider moving Mercury from its current freeware/donationware model to a shareware model. This project started because I had a need for a Mac Sametime client, I no longer have that need (new job) and now I've got to be able to justify the amount of time I'm spending on it. So what would you pay for Mercury? This goes for individuals or companies.
• The last question is would anyone out there like to purchase an 800 Mhz Powerbook G4 (1 GB, 40 GB HD, Airport)? If your interested make an offer (mercury at idavidson dot net), I don't really have a specific number in my head so the first one I see that I like I'll probably take.

Mercury 0.3a....

After month's of inactivity, a job change, and an 850+ mile move I finally got back into the Mercury code. The result is Mercury 0.3a.

• The contact list is now sorted (by the name stored on the Sametime server for your contact or group)
• The View menu contains an option to show/hide offline contacts
• Finally, the contact list has been updated to use an icon in the same manner that iChat does

Now for the next release the features I am targeting are:

• Conversion of the message view to use WebKit to render so that styling your message windows will be simple for all users
• Conversion of the Preferences interface to use a preference pane system and an expansion of the preferences available to you.
• Conversion of the password storage mechanism to use the Mac OS X keychain instead of its current insecure implementation.
• Finally, there are a few other UI issues that I'm looking to address that don't fit into words so well

I hope these updates will make Mercury a better fit for all of you, the donate button is still active and donations are appreciated now more than ever. If I don't have a feature you want yet, let me know! (mercury at idavidson dot net).

Minor update...

I'm not dead, I swear. I've been swamped with work from all corners of creation lately, and it the little spare time I have I've been trying to tackle Places support for all of you. Needless to say it is a massive pain (the way that IBM has the toolkit set up it is nigh unto impossible to do it without using the applet based API that they provide, which is ugly and not terribly useful). The main reason for this post is that the Mercury_0.2a.dmg link on the right now contains a link to a bug fix release of 0.2a apparently I lost my mind while writing some of the quit logic in Mercury. You should no longer have to force quit the application to quit it when not logged in to a Sametime server. I have also heard a number of requests for sortable columns, I have heard you but at the moment most of the requests I get are for Places and I'm concentrating on it. I won't rule out ordering showing up in some future release when I'm frustrated with Places and need to get something done. Thanks for your continued support.

Poll...

What OS are you currently using? I'm currently considering adding some features to Mercury which I could take advantage of some APIs that only exist in Mac OS X 10.3 (I can do a lot of it with some extra work but if most everyone is using 10.3 then I may branch the code base and add new Sametime features to both branches, while some new UI features will only be added to the 10.3 targeted version). Well now its up to you all to weigh in and let me know what you think.

0.2a... Released (Sort of)

0.2a is here! The features you are getting are those I mentioned in the last post. Things have been tested a bit more and you shouldn't have as many problems. I'm still working on more features and additions to this release (expect a 0.2.5a in the next week or two to bring the rest of the features I promised you before. I have heard all of you who are asking for the sortable buddy lists (it is something I want too, just not a priority for me yet). Leave feedback or send e-mail to mercury@idavidson.net (don't forget to attach those crash logs). Lastly, I hate to beg but I have set up the PayPal donation link in the sidebar and I'll provide it hear too anything you can donate would be greatly appreciated. Happy holidays!

0.2a...

Well, here I was wanting to release this thing to you all and my test server is down (well IBM's demo server was down all day, so I'm going to wait until it gets back up and I've tested a bit more). I have a few features for you, didn't get everything done yet (you'll be getting an inactive timer, auto-reconnect, and auto-connect at launch). I'll be working on the places support along with the new kernel. Sorry to let you all down, but I'd rather release it to you in a more usable state late rather than get there on time and have you find all kinds of problems.

Updates...

Ok, the trouble is that the current architecture isn't working out so well for adding some of the timer based features (it can be done, but its ugly and unreliable) you have been requesting. Most likely this is because the As such I have two courses to take:

1. I can tell you all that I can't implement the features you want, alienate half my user base, and admit defeat (something I don't usually do).
2. I can take some more time in bringing out the new feature release as I study the packet structure used to communicate with the Sametime server so that I can replace it with an Objective-C based communication kernel and build the applicatoin around it (this has the added benefit of ditching Java in the client, which would clear up many of the crashes that you are seeing ... more on that later).

Well in all honesty I'm taking road two at the moment, it carries with it many benefits not the least of which are the ability to drop all traces of Java in the client (to fix the issues that are being seen with the all to present crashes on thread 9) and it will allow the kernel to be used to provide plugins for some of the open source clients for those of you who are interested in an all in one solution (I'm currently concurrently developing Mercury and a Mercury Sametime plugin for the Adium client, which can be found at http://www.adiumx.com). Feel free to cry out against my decision if you think I'm on the wrong track. I'll still be providing a minor update on 12/21/2003 to hopefully provide a few new features for you all to play with.

Updates...

I am currently targeting December 21, 2003 for the next release of Mercury. I have finalized the feature set and finished about half of those features. Here are some of the more interesting items on the list:

• Places support. This means that you will be able to join in meetings and participate in the chat portion of them. There are some barriers I haven't worked out yet in being able to take advantage of the whiteborad and the application sharing capabilities out there.
• Preferences support. This will allow you to choose the colors for text in chats, colors for identify the status of the user in the contact list, the ability to set a time to mark you as inactive (more on this in a moment), and the ability to indicate whether Mercury should try and auto-login if you were disconnected without requesting a logout.
• Inactive timer. Will set you to inactive after the passage of a certain amount of time.
• Auto-reconnect. I think its self explanatory.
• More alert sounds and the ability to set those sounds via the preferences menu.

In e-mails and in some posts inquiries have been made about donations, I have added a donations link in the right sidebar so that you can make donations if you think Mercury warrants it.

Still working...

To be quite honest the holidays have strapped me for time and it has been busier than usual around work so I haven't had a lot of time to work on Mercury. Currently I'm working to add meeting support to Mercury as that seems to be something very important to all of you (and me actually). I am also exploring some of the other great suggestions I received (check the comments if you want to know more about what people have suggested).

I'd also like to make a request to the users out there. When Mercury generates a crash log when you are doing a particular task please copy the text that comes up and e-mail it to mercury@idavidson.net. If you would include a short description of what you were doing when it generated the report and hopefully I can iron out your problems fairly quickly for the next release. Thanks for all of the feedback, hopefully it will continue.

Coming in 0.2...

I know this may not be at the top of peoples feature lists but the screenshot to the right shows the tooltips that are going to show up in the next release so you can see the status messages of users in your contact list. Here are some other features currently under consideration, let me know which ones are most important to you:

• File transfer
• Meetings (or Places if you prefer with at least whiteboard sharing)
• Audio Chat (does anyone use it?)
• Video Chat (does anyone use it?)
• Changing your status message(i.e. allowing multiple away messages)
• Anything else you may be interested in...

Just use the comments or trackbacks to let me know what is important to you.

v0.1 alpha Released!

I am proud to announce the first publicly available alpha version of Mercury for Mac OS X. The v0.1 release contains basic functionality as described in the previous entries. Users are encouraged to download the client, use it, and I would love to hear from you about any issues that you may run into. This is the first release so there are bound to be bugs. Mercury should run just fine on either Jaguar or Panther. If there is interest I may look into supporting older versions of OS X, at the moment 10.2 and 10.3 are the only operating system versions supported. The icons and buttons used in this version are a bit rough, but they should be getting better in the future as I have a much more talented artist working on revising and enhancing them. For the technically enclined out there the client is written mostly in Objective-C using some Java code to bridge the gap from the client logic, to the Sametime toolkit provided by IBM. It has proved to be a versatile and powerful combination. Welcome to Mercury, attempting to give Mac OS X users a first class Sametime experience one line of code at a time!

Contact window......

The new Mercury messenger for Mac OS X supports both public and private Sametime groups (those whose members are stored on the server and set by administrators and those created by individual users using a Sametime client. The following are supported for user status:

• Active - Contacts shown in green.
• Not Using - Contacts shown in yellow.
• Away - Contacts shown in yellow.
• Do Not Disturb - Contacts shown in red.
• Offline - Contacts shown in grey.

The contact list window also provides the mechanism for logging in and out of Mercury, these buttons are located in the lower left hand corner of the window. The contact list can be modified by using the two buttons in the lower right hand corner. The remove button will remove either an entire group or only the select user. The add contact window allows one to enter a name, resolve any conflicts that may arise, and add that user to a new or existing contact group (the groups tab will also allow public groups to be added to your contact list). Starting a chat with another user is as simple as highlighting their name and double clicking (support for contextual menus providing the ability to do more than chat i.e. meetings, etc... is planned for a future release). A user is only available to chat with if they are in the Active, Away, or Not Using States. Offline users and those indicating a Do Not Disturb status will result in no action if double clicked on. Users are encouraged to leave comments about features they would like to see added or bugs you find (until we get a formal bug tracking solution installed here).

Add contacts...

The add contacts window supports two mechanisms for enhancing an existing contact list, the user can add either of:

• Contacts, or
• Public Groups

Once the user has decided to lookup a contact, they are presented with a tab view to select one of the above options. The user addition process is very simple:

1. Type the name or a portion of the name.
2. Resolve any conflicts that may exist by selecting the desired user.
3. Choose a group name from one of the personal groups or type a new group name in the combo box.
4. Finally hit the "Add Contact" button to add the user to your contact list

When working on the groups tab things are even easier. When attempting to add a contact, the user can type only a portion of the name and they will be given a list of matching items to choose from. The Sametime system does not support conflict resolution in public group lookups, therefore you have to know the full name of the group before you can add it. When you type in the name the group and its contents are added to your buddy list automatically.

Chats...

The chat windows in Mercury are modeled after those found in Apple's own iChat. The message viewing area identifies your partner in the chat by highlighting thier name in green. Future addtions to the chat window will include the ability to have a timestamp printed with each message, the ability to use smiley faces in chat conversations, and any features that may be suggested by the user base. Incoming messages are brought to the attention of the user by way of the traditional combination of a bouncing dock icon and a momentary sound. Feel free to leave comments indicating any additons you would like to see!