November 16, 2003

v0.1 alpha Released!

alpha-0_1.jpg 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!

Posted by developer at November 16, 2003 04:00 PM
Comments

Outstanding !! CS !!

Posted by: Tony Soprano at November 16, 2003 06:10 PM

This is really great. I work at paramount pictures in hollywood and we've been looking for a sametime client.
Keep up the good work, and keep me informed as newer versions become availble.

Posted by: Welton Gite at November 17, 2003 12:44 PM

Also, will you be adding a file transfer feature like sametime 3.1???

Posted by: Welton Gite at November 17, 2003 12:48 PM

Welton-

The file transfer feature is on our "radar screens" and it should be in the next release (0.2) or the one following that one. Thanks for the feedback and let me know if there is anything else you would like to see.

Regards,
-Dave

Posted by: developer at November 17, 2003 12:55 PM

.1a isnt logging in for me. I dont get an error or anything. Is there anything I can try or do to log errors?

Thanks - John

Posted by: John at November 24, 2003 05:48 PM

This is an excellent client and I am very glad to see the work you have done on it. Some features that would be useful to consider:
1) Controls over how the buddy list is displayed - i.e. only show groups with active contacts, show all contacts
2) Ability to close the buddy list window and bring it back. i.e. if you click close on the contact window, it goes away and you can not get it back
3) Ability to click on links in the received message and launch the preferred browser
4) Automatically log in when you launch Mercury
5) Automatically reconnect when you lose your network connection and then reconnect (i.e. moving your laptop from one place to another
6) A menu bar icon (like IChat) that allows you to see the active buddies and send a message to them from the drop down.
7) Control over sorting of the groups in the contacts list - currently it seems to be a random sort order

Posted by: John Toebes at November 30, 2003 06:11 PM

The Mercury 0.1a link does not work properly under Mozilla/Camino. The mime type for the download seems to be set 'text', such that it loads in the browser window rather than downloading. Otherwise, nice start!

Posted by: jav at December 5, 2003 11:07 AM

OK, to be truly uber geeky, wouldn't it be great if we could set our status through AppleScript. That way I could use something like iChatStatus to show everyone at work what song I'm playing. Yeah, not very important, but uber cool.

Posted by: Kevin Erickson at December 10, 2003 11:50 AM