So with some luck I should polish off these last few things (6 items in my task list) and be ready for a release so people can really find the bugs. :)

Recently Done Stuff:

• Contact List - Added a clear field button to the popup search bar. Easier than having to delete all the text in there now to make it disappear again!
• Contact List - Added preferences to the settings window so it’s quicker to get to if you have menus turned off.
• Contact List - Fixed the iconholder “…” (when you don’t have enough space to show all the medium orbs) bug. Turned out to be a bug in Astra itself which Kevin so kindly killed!
• Contact List - Made the avatar larger in the square. Was a bit small compared to the actual square area.
• Contact List - Moved menu in a fraction. It was sitting right on the edge which looked a bit ‘meh’.
• Contact List - Themed text in search bar so it’s a bit easier to read now. :)
• Contact List - Changed the look of the search bar for a more Bleach-ish look.
• Containers - Added hide button option to containers (via editing xml file) for Christie!
• File Transfer - Changed file transfer window to have no execute button if you’re the one sending the file.
• Group Chat - Added chat browser.
• Message Window - Added a “User not online” notice. Not too big or annoying - just obvious.
• Message Window - Added profile viewing.
• Message Window - Fixed width for accept/deny thingy so it doesn’t wrap and look ugly.
• Message Window - Incoming video fixing. Switch to vid mode
• Message Window - Made a new set of toolbar icons that were more Bleach-ish and less cartoonish
• Message Window - Added light version of above toolbar buttons.
• Message Window - Made a new View Profile Button.
• Message Window - Fixed user not online so it doesn’t show when an add-request comes through
• Message Windows - Fixed widget display area. It got an overhaul codewise along the way, and I didn’t notice. :)
• Notification Windows - Fixed the logo in the notifier window.
• Notifier - Made a bunch of Accept/Deny windows for the notifier.
• Notifier - Fixed the missing icon/image in the notifier window. Code changes without me knowing again. :)
• Panels - Made different icons for all the panel types.
• Profile Editor - Added Flash detection - Need to DL flash 9 page.
• Profile Editor - Got Add Web Service working
• Profile Editor - Got Add Widget working
• Profile Editor - Fixed the Mini widgets, the text was big and wrong!
• Profile Editor - Moved the trillian mini thing to the Intro page
• Profile Editor - Made some new Basic Info icons.
• Profile Editor - Text was themed in a few places. Name, services..
• Video - got it all working!

I’m not switching from my PC, this is just an extra tool to add to my arsenal of gadgets, but it does mean I have an increased interest in the Mac OS X version of Astra.

I’ll post a bit more of a “My Experiences with a Mac” as soon as I get a little more familiar with things. :)

There was, however, a minor “fix” that for us skinners is a rather l-a-r-g-e change:

• 5523 Kevin Kurtz FIXED [SkinXML] Support for slice inside the resize tag

It doesn’t sound like much, but in skinning terms roughly 100 or so lines of needed code were just wiped from the “to do list”.

The resize code is the one part of your skin that defines where (if you hover your mouse over the skin) you can resize the contact list (or whatever window you’re viewing).

With this new simplified code, you can make a full working custom window skin in quite a small size. I posted the complete xml of a simple custom window over at the Trillian forums which you can see here.

Although the simple skin has limited features, you can see how simple it is now to create a working skin. I’ll be updating and finishing off my tutorials in the near future so anyone can make their own custom window skins!

So it’s with this “bias towards Trillian” angle that I decided to give Digsby a go. I’d heard a lot of positive talk about it so was keen to see what it offered and how well it does it. As the skinning side of things is something I’m interested in, I’ll focus on this side plus any other day-to-day kind of stuff I might come across.

My knowledge is quite minimal when it comes to Digsby, so I’ll be making assumptions all over the place (probably wrong). I’m sure I could find accurate info on the Digsby website if I were to look a bit harder than I have - but what fun would that be? :) I tend to run blindly until something breaks, so excuse any inaccuracies I may include!

Installing

Installation was a breeze (as it should be) but I did notice the installer added the visual C++ runtime library to my system. Not a big deal, and it probably mentioned it somewhere in the license that I accepted, it’s just something I didn’t expect to see.

So first up, I sign up for an account. It appears it uses a central database of some kind to store account information. The advantage of this is being able to install the application anywhere (other PC, friends place, etc etc) and have it automagically grab your connection details and contact lists. As with any system like this, a percentage of the general public will be a little concerned about having their account details stored in a central location. I personally would trust Digsby more than the actual IM providers themselves the least (AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, we’re looking at you!). If you’re one who likes to know how their data is stored elsewhere, you can check out the privacy policy at their site or read about their security here at their wiki.

Into It

After adding an IM account (just my AIM account as it lets me log in multiple times without too much complaint) and I have a contact list happening! It’s funny to see it referred to as the Buddy List, as the buddy list is what Trillian used to call it way back in the dark ages (2001). See the pic below, on the left is Digsby, on the right is the original Trillian skin applied to Astra as a custom window. What’s old is new again! :)

I also added a couple social network details and my Twitter account to see how it handles them - and it handles them quite well. I’m still one of these old-school internet users who struggles with the whole concept and popularity of social networking sites. There’s only so many attacks by zombies or fight club invites I can bear, so having them at hand from my desktop is something I don’t care for, but I can see that some people really do need to know when they’ve been poked or attacked.

The Twitter side of things would be handy though, but I tend to either use the web interface or just send an IM to the Twitter-Aimbot when I update mine.

That’s a Big Ram!

One thing I had heard about Digsby was the huge amount of ram that it used. I was curious to check it out, so did it the only way I really know (Task Manager) which I have heard isn’t the most accurate thing around (due to the way some apps handle their memory issues or something) but it gave me something to work with at the very least.

On firing up Digsby and connecting to just one medium, it was sitting on a whopping 83mb. To compare this to other apps I was running at the time, Flash CS3 was using 79mb, firefox 96mb - so it was quite large.

I had read an article recently on how Mozilla had reduced the ram usage of Firefox, and in that they had mentioned that ram is cleared at certain times (so what you see now, might be reduced in the future), so I thought I would leave it running over night, and see how it was in the morning.

After leaving it for about 8 hours, I see it’s settled to a much more reasonable amount, roughly 33mb - not so bad after all. I’m just not sure “when” this ram was cleared (or really why for that matter?? maybe related to Visual C++??)

But onto the skinning side of things.

I’ve been skinning Trillian since the early days, so I’m always keen to see more skinning options out there and prospective applications where I can convert my skins over to. I saw this feature listed on the Digsby website, and thought I may have found something to skin:

• Customize digsby with application skins to give it a personal look and feel.

However, I’m really hoping this feature hasn’t been fully fleshed out, because so far it doesn’t appear to be very skinnable at all. The window runs in native mode (that is, it uses a standard windows frame so takes on the look of your OS or current OS Theme) so you are limited to skinning the inside the window. This in itself should be pushed as a feature as it’s something Trillian users have been asking for since day zero.

If you want to change the look of the entire window, you really need to load up a new Windows theme (via Window Blinds or similar app) as skinning Digsby is currently limited to just what’s inside the actual window. As I said earlier, this is something that should probably be promoted as a feature as there are a lot of people who prefer this, but unfortunately it also limits the types of skins you can expect to see. With the current system every contact list is going to be much the same looking, but with just some new colours, gradients, or images thrown in (menu, status, etc are all in the same place). I personally like the freedom to put things where I want and change how the whole thing looks (but that’s just me!).

So, in my opinion Digsby’s skinning is more theming than skinning. Some new colors and a changed icon or 2 (imho) doesn’t equal a skin. That’s a theme in my eyes, but I guess it all depends on the persons interpretation of the words!

Switch “skin” to Darkness

or one of it’s variants

I had a bit of a poke around in the files for Digsby, but unfortunately couldn’t see anything that was an obvious skin/theme file. After checking out the forums and then a tutorial posted on a wiki it just seems I didn’t dig deep enough and the skinning side of things is achieved using yaml. I am wondering if there are any plans in the future to open up the skinning options a bit more and maybe allow for the removal of the native window border/edges or something similar. The devs have posted in the forums that the skinning API isn’t complete, so things might change in the coming future.

On a positive skinning note, I noticed the conversation themes (which really are closer to a skin than the contact list skins are… lol) are very nice. I think I did see somewhere (again I could be wrong) that Digsby uses Adium message styles and I did notice some familiar ones when I checked them out. After checking the wiki, Digsby does indeed use Adium message styles, so that means there are oodles of existing themes out there that could be put to use. (A good thing!)

So on the skinning side of things:

• Contact List skinning = bad
• Message Style skinning = good

It’s only early days, so I’ll keep an eye on this in the future.

Like it Or…?

Like it. :)

So, overall Digsby feels polished. That in itself is an achievement for something so new. (how long since the very first private build is it?)

In the usability stakes, it’s great - does what it’s meant to and does it well (love being able to reply to a message in a notification window), and I can see why it’s getting a growing number of fans out there. It’s nice to have a “works out of the box” application to play with much like Trillian. Thankfully it’s not like Miranda’s “add-this-to-make-this-happen” style system of plugins.

So in conclusion, I will be keeping an eye on things over at the Digsby farm and see what directions some things go (skinning stuff). If they head in the same direction they have with all the other features (the right direction) it will be interesting to see the end result. Good job. :)

Related Links:

• Digsby website
• Digsby Blog
• Digsby Customization Forum
• Digsbies - Skins
• Digsby Wiki
• Digsby Skin Documentaion

New in this build was the “last” of the official features to be added: Video support!

I managed to grab my copy just as it was released and immediately bugged Kevin Kurtz (kwk, one of the 2 head developers and owners at Cerulean Studios) and asked if I could try out the video chat functionality with him! (I thought it would be polite to ask, seeing as it was 4am at his end!)

So after opening up a chat window and finding the Video chat button, I hit the button to see what happened! Kevin wasn’t particularly confident that it would be flawless (long distance!), but I was!

Next thing I know I have a black window and a figure started to appear - there was Kevin in all his “other side of the world at 4am” glory! It worked well, extremely well actually! Video and audio syncing was perfect, and the frame rate was quite smooth. We were both impressed and only at one point did the audio go slightly scratchy, but that soon cleared up and it ran smoothly. Success!

After letting Kevin go (he had to drive home from the office yet, and being a father of some youngens, would mostly likely be up again in a few hours), I had a bit of a quick look at the other changes.

• The new splash screen. Not a major feature or really even a minor one, but a sign we’re moving towards a beta release when things start to get some polish added.
• Medium connection status alerts. If a medium decides to boot you or drops out, you will get a little message popup in the contact list saying that the medium had disconnected with a “Reconnect” button. My question here is - is this needed? If you’ve been disconnected (and you were connected beforehand) then chances are you do want to reconnect. I haven’t looked into it much yet, but why not just automatically reconnect? Maybe it has tried a certain amount of times already? If so, maybe initiate a timer and try again later? Maybe it does all this already, and it’s just my short experience with this that is the problem. :) Either way, I will check with the CS guys.
• Connect option available directly from the iconholder. A tiny option that’s heaps handy for me. I never autoconnect to any mediums when I run Astra (comes from when I am skinning, if I make it crash I don’t want to be continually reconnecting to all the mediums). So for me to connect to my other mediums (prior to build 75) I would have to go into the preferences section, then into the connections and manually select each medium and tell it to connect. Now I can just click the orb in the iconholder and tell it to connect. Simple, but useful. :)
• User is offline alert now pops up if a person you are talking to goes offline while chatting to them. I’m not 100% sure here, but I had this appear for me, but the user then came online shortly afterwards. The alert was still showing though - again another one I have to check out to see if it’s just my short usage missing something!

So how has the reception been for this build? Well, good and bad. Good because it’s great to see video finally re-added to the app and all the other little features. Bad because there appears to be an issue for some people when they upgrade to this build where it kills your contacts and connection info! Personally I had no problems with the upgrade whatsoever. However a friend of mine lost everything (as have quite a few other people out there). There are some hints and tips on how to fix the issue (delete connecion .ini files) but it’s definitely a bug that will need fixing!

Another question that is now being posed is, with the video support, it’s currently in for only the Astra protocol, what about the others? Both Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are quite popular out there, so will we see support for the other mediums?

I asked Scott (smw) just after my video test with Kevin, and he wasn’t totally committing to the idea, but said they would keep an eye on things and make a decision on it. Chances are there will be a lot of call for it!

So overall quite a positive release (featurewise) just not so positive on the “break everything” bug for some people! From a skinning point of view, it’s yet another item that needs to be skinned (coz there’s such a lack of things that need skinning, lol), but it looks like it’s the last big “add” and so, most likely the last big new things that needs skinning!

Update: As of this morning when I woke up, Astra was telling me that there was a new build available to grab, so I let it update while I took a shower and came back to build 76. CS fixed the major-breaker problem, so there were a whole lot of happier people out there.

My main surprise was at how low Miranda was (expected much higher), although it did mention it only had limited information about their site (is that because it’s on a .org domain??).

It’s interesting to see the spike that Digsby has created. As things go, Digsby is the most polished competitor out there to Trillian with it being pretty much a “out of the box” app without the need to install a heap of plugins to get normal functionality (yes, we’re looking at you Miranda!).

It’s very close to being complete, with only a few features needing to be added and then (when build 75 of Astra is released) Video chat support should be the last feature to add. Then it’s time to tidy up all the loose ends and get it ready for a proper release.