[Adium-devl] Some disclosure and some ideas.

[Colin Barrett]

First off, I'd like to fully disclose that starting January 8th, I'll  
officially be an employee of the Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly  
owned by the Mozilla Foundation. I'll be working on making Firefox a  
better browser on the Mac, and I presume lending my voice and Mac  
expertise/sensibilities to the development of Mozilla 2.0 (basically,  
a restructuring of the Moz code to make it more manageable and  
maintainable). I spent some time there this week, and both Adium and  
Growl got a bit of a cheering and some applause when they were  
mentioned at my introduction -- a lot of people there use MacBooks and  
run Adium on them :)

Despite my newfound employment, I'm definitely going to try to remain  
involved with the project. I've ben doing this for four years, why  
stop now? :)

Anyway, on to the meat of the email, which is mostly just a bunch of  
lists. Firstly: Adium development has slowed down a bit over the past  
couple of months, with school and what not, but things tend to pick up  
during the holidays, so I just wanted to throw out some things I think  
we should be getting done in the next month or two:

- Finally release 1.0.
- Finish our plugin architecture. I think we are most of the way to  
getting something we can support at least some initial development on.

In the more long term, I think we should try to get some of these  
things done, for the health of the project:

- Codify our procedures that are in place, and document more of our  
community structure on our wiki. The PatchMaster idea was a good one,  
but I think it should be retooled to reflect reality, where we have  
reviewers who check things in. For example, I think we should make  
sure that anything major that gets checked in to a release branch or  
trunk gets looked at by at least one set of eyes. We don't need to  
institute a formal code review process (yet), but what we've been  
doing with branches seems to work well, and I think that definitely  
should be written down and codified somewhere.
- After doing the above, we should look at our practices and see what  
we can do better, and how we can keep things involved. I've noticed  
that the Mozilla projects tend to have weekly meetings on IRC, with an  
agenda on the wiki people can add things to. Perhaps we ought to give  
that a shot? There are a bunch of other things we can try, too.
- Finish the unit testing work. This is so important, it will allow us  
to track regressions and keep us from doing the two steps forward, one  
step back dance.
- Perhaps investigate a different SCM system. Subversion is fantastic,  
but I think we have already started to see some limitations of it's  
merge and branch support. That said, svn 1.5 has improvements in this  
area, so we'll see. That said, it wouldn't hurt to do a test import  
into various other SCMs (darcs? Mercurial? git? Bazaar?), if anyone is  
interested. Perhaps we can recruit someone on IRC or something.

Some thoughts on remaining relevant as a product:

- Jabber. Turning Adium into a top notch Jabber client is how we're  
gonna remain relevant in the future, IMO, and we're doing a lot  
already, and I think we should continue on this.
- MSN. Our MSN support sucks, and it's our most popular protocol.  
There isn't a whole lot we can do to libgaim, but we should definitely  
keep our eyes peeled.
- Events. I think one way to compete with iChat 4 (which has many of  
our features), is to add much more robust events system with a great  
UI (seee Augie's email thread). Since Leopard is coming out in the  
spring, I really think this is something we should definitely think  
about spending a lot of time on in the coming months.
- Quicksilver. Adium and QS seem to attract a lot of the same users.  
Eventually I'll get around to writing one, but I encourage someone to  
either continually poke me or to beat me to it :)
- Audio/Video. We're making (slow) progress in this area, which is  
good (and not so good). We're eventually going to need it to compete,  
there's just no question. If anyone has any ideas about how to speed  
this up ($$$?), please, speak!
- Committers/Community. We've got a great community of triage and  
forum users set up, which is awesome. Now we need to start building up  
our developer community. The Map of Adium Peter has been working on  
(and I've been neglecting — sorry!) is a great start, and I think it's  
something we should focus on. Our numbers are only going to dwindle,  
not grow.

Some updates on things I work on:
- Shirts have stalled for the moment while I think about  
"distribution" (the term used by companies in that business is  
fulfillment). I may just end up shipping things out of my place in  
California after I move in January. We aren't going to be selling THAT  
many units this time around, at least I don't think.
- Scrollbar improvements branch: Haven't worked on it in nearly a  
month. I'm fairly sure I can get everything working though, I just  
need to sit down and *do* it.

I think that's most of what I wanted to get down. I'm a bit jetlagged,  
so please excuse any incoherentness.

I've been pretty much off the radar for about a month. What's been  
happening?

Long windedly,
-Colin