Archives

I'm not exactly sure why, but I've been receiving a number of emails and instant messages in recent weeks and months, asking about the fate of Miranda. Most people were, in some or another way, asking:

Is it dead?

First of all, no, it's not dead. Fact is, an Open Source project cannot die, because there is no single person or organization that controls it. The code is available to anyone, so anyone could pick it up and continue development at any time. Whether or not this will happen, nobody can know for sure. Also, it's obviously not possible to predict when it will happen, so stop asking. Nobody can answer it.

Personally, I've stated more than once that I see my work on the plugins and core code I've contributed over the last years, as finished. There are several reasons for this and lack of time is one of the more important ones. Whether or not this is a final decision, I cannot say. It very well might be or maybe not, only time will tell.

Read more...

After quite some time without any updates, I finally found time to take care of my aging Wiki. Because of some troubles (mainly bad performance and some old and no longer maintained extensions acting up), I decided to switch from MediaWiki to PmWiki and I'm loving it. PmWiki's simplicity paired with its powerful feature set is quite impressive, to say so.

The transition went with relative easy (with the help of some perl scripts to convert some of the markup differences between MediaWiki and PmWiki) and most of the pages are already online. Links should be fixed, but some orphans may still be straying around.

At the same time, I'm currently updating the TabSRMM documentation for version 3. Because of the many changes in the plugin, this is a lengthy process and it may take a while until I can finish it. The most important things are already done though.

Because of the different page organization system in PmWiki, some URLs had to change and the direct links in the TabSRMM option page may result in a 404. When possible, I installed redirection pages and I already updated the "Help" links in the plugin.

After more than one year of development, new versions of the popular instant messenger were officially released on Wednesday, August 25, 2010.

TabSRMM 3.0

TabSRMM Version 3

Development for TabSRMM Version 3 has started quite a while ago and is currently still in an early stage. There have been 1000's of changes in the code and while the major rewrites are more or less finished, there is still quite a lot of work left.

Version 3 will be quite different from previous versions in many ways. There are a few new features and many changes to existing features. Also, TabSRMM 3 has been optimized and major internal changes will make it work faster while using less resources at the same time.

A few features were removed from the plugin in order to clean the code up and remove redundant or poorly implemented code.

Read more...

This is a small update only

No new features. The only change is the implementation of the new plugin interface which will soon be a requirement for Miranda 0.8 (currently in early alpha development stage).

This is for people who are testing preview builds of Miranda 0.8 ONLY. Please do not download this when you are still running a stable Miranda version (0.7.x or earlier) as this may not work.

The binary archive contains both UNICODE and ANSI versions of the plugin in separate folders. Obviously, you should only install one of them :)

Downloads:

SndVol Plugin source code

Binary from googlecode

It has come to my attention that the modified sndVol plugin which I offered a while ago will cause a "crash on exit" when running under a current Miranda 0.7.x nightly build.

This is probably caused by some of the bigger changes in Miranda. The problem was identified and fixed and you can download the modified binary here.

*Warning*: It has been tested with Miranda 0.7.x *only*. If you are running Miranda 0.5 or 0.6, you shouldn't upgrade. There are no new features in this plugin - it is really only a fix for a possible crash on exit.

*Download binary:* SndVol

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...

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:
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...

Today, I made the decision to outsource the skin editor for clist_nicer+ and make it an extra plugin.

That means, the old Background+ page will soon vanish from clist_nicer+ and a new dialog will be added to the customize section when the skin editor plugin is loaded.

The reasons are quite simple: Since clist_nicer+ and tabSRMM share roughly the same skinning engine (+ skin file format), the skin editor can later be used for both plugins. Also, as an extra plugin it can save memory and other resources for people who don't want to edit skins but only want to load existing ones.

It also means, that I'll probably improve the skin editor with some features for editing image items and give it a better, more user-friendly user interface than it currently has (that Background+ page is really ugly and overloaded with UI elements now and badly needs some improvements...)