Mercury - Sametime Messenger for Mac OS X

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.