[Adium-devl] For Review: iChat Import Assistant & Brief Announcement

[disposable at infinitenexus.com]

A couple months ago Tick asked me to look into what it would take to  
import information from iChat into Adium like we've done with Fire. I  
went to work on the project and started a branch of 1.0, adium- 
ichatimport, to address this. The relevant new classes and nib for  
this are in a top level group in the branch's project called "iChat  
Importer". In the course of my research I found Logorrhea, an open  
source iChat transcript viewer from Spiny Software, that has allowed  
us to include their code for parsing the iChat transcript format[s].  
As of today I feel that it's ready for review by the greater  
developer community for possible merging and inclusion in 1.1 (as  
Tick has noted in prior emails.)

Features:
Available from the Help menu, designed to be run multiple times
Ability to choose what's imported (optional phases)
Imports accounts, statuses, and transcripts (both formats)
Option to group imported statuses in applicable status groups

Branch Change:
Adium's Setup Assistant now has a button on the Welcome page,  
"Information about Importing" that shows a sheet with (surprise!)  
information about importing and the ability to open other assistants.  
I thought this the most unobtrusive way to add this in, as an  
automatic prompt is obnoxious. Dedicated assistants are likely the  
simplest path for adding [n] importers (as we are not necessarily  
limited to Fire and iChat) and redoing the entire setup wizard for  
each addition is more complicated IMO than just having a sheet to  
worry about and the self-contained importers. It dampens reusability  
a bit, but with some refactoring that could be made more negligible.

Known Issues:
- Doesn't properly use the localization parts of Adium, it's quick  
and dirty in that sense
- There's a #pragma warning for the help book anchor to make sure  
it's added
- Activity only occurs on the main thread, so chatting/etc. isn't  
wise while using this
- I was unable to find a reliable way to detect the local account for  
a transcript to map to our Service.Account structure (iChat uses the  
originating party in its tracking) so there's an account selection  
step for transcript importing (I'm happy to be corrected if someone  
spots a solution though)
- Log importing doesn't detect if the file has been imported before  
so each time it imports all items
< your bug/complaint here >

To test this functionality I recommend using the multiple user  
profiles feature in Adium (hold the Option key at launch) and create  
a new profile so the assistant will appear when you log in and you  
can get started.

I look forward to your feedback and I hope you'll find it a useful  
addition to Adium experience; if you have comments, critiques, bugs  
or other notes you can reply on or off-list and I'll address them as  
quickly as possible.

--------

On to my brief announcement...

I've accepted (yay!) a position at Apple as a Mac OS X Desktop  
Software Engineer (working on Apple Remote Desktop) and will be  
transitioning into this over the course of the next few months. As  
such my schedule is going to be in flux and many parts have to give.  
One aspect of that (unfortunately) is my time for Adium (another is  
my time for Infinite Nexus.)

I'm _not_ leaving by any stretch of the imagination, but I'll likely  
be more of a phantom (though I'll be available for mentoring) to  
provide time for other work to proceed, such as work on the 1.1  
release of Growl. As each project and time allows I'll be back  
though, who can resist the siren quack of The Duck :)  Cheers!

- brian 'bgannin' ganninger


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