Archives

Another big improvement is lurking just around the corner.

So far, no solution (except maybe external, commercial software) was available to allow spell checking in the message window.

This has just changed. Pescuma wrote a plugin to add spell checking support for all SRMM based message windows. This project is just a few days old, but is already working very well for people who are on the bleeding edge and use alpha SVN builds of tabSRMM (and possibly other messaging plugins).

Read more...

Some may already have noticed it. There was some teamwork recently to utilize the well known History++ plugin as a message history viewer inside the message window - tabSRMM in that case.

For a short while, History++ was faking the IEVIew API so that it was able to replace IEView as a message history viewer. But now, it has got its own API, so tabSRMM can finally implement a method to select one of 3 possible ways to display the message history:

• Default message log (richedit based, all the known features like templates and such)
• IEView (no need to say more, most people know it as it is one of the most popular plugins in the world of Miranda)
• History++ - the great history viewing plugin for Miranda has now become modular enough to be used outside the history window.

Following the tradition to make everything in tabSRMM as flexible as possible, these settings can be selected both globally and per contact. The global option is on the "Message Log" options page and is now a combo box allowing you to select one of the 3 options. Please note, that this combo box will only list plugins which are installed to avoid confusion. So the History++option is only available when History++ is installed and running. Read more...

Ghazan commited a big patch to tabsrmm. Basically, it is the same stuff which went into chat.dll, making most of the group chat API unicode safe.

This is a huge patch, and bugs are very likely to exist as of now. We are aware of it and will work them out over time. So, before installing a new tabSRMM build from SVN or a new nightly, you should backup your old DLL. Reports like "chat broken, doesn't work" will be silently ignored, detailed reports are always welcome, of course.

This only affects the unicode build of tabSRMM

These changes are effecive beginning with October, 4th 2006 (version number was increased to 1.1.0.10).

Ok, later than many others, but finally I also installed a preview of Vista on my main PC. This time it is RC1 which means that this version should already reflect the final product, except bug fixes (it's feature complete, for sure now).

There isn't much to say about Vista except that it:
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The latest version of loadavatars has been released to the file listing.

This is basically 0.0.2.4 released a few days ago with a few minor fixes:

• fixed support for the updater plugin
• Small change in the initialization code to workaround a minor bug in Miranda core (hinted by ghazan).
• fixed keyboard navigation in the *Customize->Contact pictures* dialog.

Download locations

ANSI
UNICODE

Clist Nicer+ has been released in version 0.7.0.2 to the file listing.

This is basically the same version as came with the last nightly build (#60) with a few minor issues fixed. It also comes together with the skin editor (cln_skinedit.dll) which is a replacement for the old Background+ page.

The new skin editing page can be found under Customize->Contact list skin->Skin items.

Download locations

ANSI

UNICODE

Source code is available via SVN in the official Miranda IM repository at sourceforge.net.

The binaries are compiled with Visual C++ 6, so no additional libraries are needed.

1.0 is out

Today, I uploaded tabSRMM 1.0.0.0 to the Miranda file listing (also known as the addons page).

Both Unicode and ANSI versions are available now. They require Miranda 0.5.0.0, although the ANSI version should run on 0.4.x.x (but that is an unsupported configuration).

The DLLs are built with Visual C++ 6.0, so no additional libraries are required.
The default icon pack is included as well.

The "plan" for future developments

tabSRMM 1.0.0.x will be feature frozen from now on. This means, the 1.0.0.x branch will only get bug fixes but no new features. It will also be kept compatible with the Miranda 0.5 series.

New features will go in the trunk code (which currently has a version number of 1.1.0.6).

For a list of changes you can view the included changelog or search this blog. There is also the forum where you can find a lot more additional informations.

Known issues in that build

• some minor formatting problems are still left in auto - bidirectional mode, although, the current code has much improved. Almost all formatting options, including grid lines and mutliple background colors, are again working and most visual artifacts (wrong background colors etc.) should no longer appear.
• when using auto-bidi mode, the last message will show an additional newline. This is not avoidable, because otherwise the rich edit control won't properly format the last message in the history.
• Disconnecting from IRC while multiple group chat windows or tabs are still open may lead to a crash. That may also happen on exit, so I suggest that you first close all containers before you exit Miranda. This is currently under investigation as it is not clear whether it is a problem in IRC or tabSRMM (or maybe both).
• Skinning should still be considered alpha quality code. It works well for many people, but there are minor issues.
• Same goes for message splitting. It basically works, but there are issues which are beyond my control (e.g. it doesn't work with ICQ offline messages since the ICQ protocol does not report the proper message size limit when a contact is offline).

I'am currently working on a *real* documentation for tabSRMM. This will be a standard Windows helpfile in HTML-help format (.CHM). A plain HTML version will also be available.

This will take a while though, since there is a lot of stuff to write - I'am just realizing how big tabSRMM has become over time and how many things can be told about it :)

Automatically split long messages

First, I've always been against this and I still think that automatically splitting messages is a bad thing, at least, in Miranda, because the way how message sending works does only allow it with a few drawbacks.
However, this is one of those features which will always be re-requested over and over again (no idea why it is so important, but well...).
Nevertheless there is now a working implementation in tabSRMM, but it should be used with care. Read the list below to get the facts and understand that most of these things are not going to change.

Read more...

On reporting bugs

Right now, Miranda's bug tracker gets a big amount of attention by someone who has taken the ball and is currently trying to clear up the mess which has managed to accumulate for the last few months or even years. Based on this, I want to talk a bit on bug reporting - remember that good bug reports are one of the keys to better software quality. A relatively small open source project like Miranda doesn't have its own QA - its quality depends on its users from the community who help with testing and reporting things which need to be improved.

Software has bugs. That is not a nice thing but a fact we all have to understand when using software. Some bugs are critical and have the potential to stop you from using the software or cause loss of vital data, others may only cause some annoyances when using it. Read more...