So I've had random issues with Trillian before, but I've always just said, eh... who cares? For example, when using an animated gif as my buddy icon, my load times were terrible (like upwards of two minutes to start the app). Furthermore, it would use 99% of the CPU the entire time it was loading. So I got rid of the animated buddy icon and life was fine.
However, I discovered an annoyance today which means bye bye for Trillian: 153 million page faults. It produces 6 page faults a second while sitting in the idle state. That translates into 21,600 page faults an hour. My machine typically doesn't get rebooted until a new critical update comes out (every two months or so), which means that I'm using 518,000 page faults a day. Or a measly 31,104,000 every two months. It also looks like they leak GDI Objects every time I open up a new IM window (either that, or they agressively cache things).
So I figured I'd do the right thing and let them know about this bug. Except I was unable to locate any bug reporting links on their website. I hunted around for a good twenty minutes, and either I'm blind, or the only way to report bugs is via the "contact us" email address (not terribly professional for a selling product).
So I give up -- Trillian is off my system, and I feel bad for not being able to help them out.. but hey, if I can't find the link to report bugs, what are the chances they'd bother fixing it?
Uh, why not write it in RealBasic? It ought to be a trivial exercise.
heh, trivial he says. ;-)
Some of those protocols require reverse engineering and come with some very interesting legal issues. Is it possible to do? Sure! Do I have the time to support the 4 different protocols I use (AIM, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo)? Hell no. :-P
You could of course use Jabber and let the server deal with those issues. Then you only have to support one protocol, and you're not reverse engineering anything. Plus the protocol is highly documented and XML for easy parsing.
You're just fishing for me to implement a Jabber protocol in REALbasic, aren't you? ;-) It's an interesting idea, but I've got so many other things on my plate to do that I'm hard-pressed to justify adding another one. Especially when the solution already exists (in various forms) where others have done the work.
[subliminal message] do it Aaron [/subliminal message]
Start running when people say something "should be easy". :D I use Fire on the Mac to connect to ICQ, MSN, AIM, Jabber, & Yahoo. When I was stuck using Windows at my old job, I used Trillian.
Heh, yes -- when it's "easy" or "cosmetic" then something is amiss. ;-) I've used Fire before, but my Mac has generally be relegated to sit nicely in a corner and only gets used for CodeWarrior; everything else happens on the Windows box.
For Trillian, only paid/Pro users get actual technical support. Otherwise you have to use the forums. Just one of the many reasons I abadoned them a year ago (I *was* a paid/pro user, and the application was just too unstable, and the support team didn't reply back to my ticket for over a week)
I'm not even interested in support -- I just wanted to let them know about the bug so they can think about fixing it for a future release.
In my defense, I never said it would be easy. :) I notice that most Jabber software implementations are very incomplete, both server-side and client-side.
However, here at Matterform, we've been jonesing for a Jabber client library in RB for some time. We'd like to have long-range distributed communication possibilities in our apps and figure that's the only way to go. Like everyone else, we've got a lot on our plate right now so it's probably just not going to happen (at least until we really need it, rather than merely want it).
Hey! I am the one that said it would be easy....for Aaron that is. It would be easy on ce he did all the grunt work and made the library for us, then we could just drag and drop and all is good with the world. There would even be an Attaboy in it for him (oh hell, I would be happy to donate a throw rug or two)...
Damn! Premature Submit button hittage.
Who better to whip out a Jabber library for realbasic, than the one guy who knows everything there is to know about REALbasic networking? The Guru of all things networked? The Maharishi of TCP-IPee?
Ok, nobody uses Jabber. Sorry, it's true. Stop talking about Jabber. Writing Jabber support is a waste of time... I'm grumpy, but I get sick of hearing about all these super slick technology that, practically, nobody actually uses. "Does the iPod have OGG file support? Of course not. Who uses OGG files? Three geeks in a basement somewhere? Why the hell would Apple go out of their way to support 3 geeks in a basement somewhere who probably steal all their music anyway?" Ok, I'm grumpy this morning, sorry.
Secondly, Trillian has a strange "skinned" mutant interface that really sucks-ass anyway.
On Windows, I use GAIM because it's the Windows port of Adium. (Or probably the other way around; or both of them are ported from Linux, but whatever.) GAIM and Adium both have issues and somewhat awkward UIs. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that GAIM kind of sucks. But it gets the basics done, and it doesn't crash, and it has a spell-checker, so that's the bare minimum I need done.
What's really sad is that the Windows version of AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger are so full of advertising, pointless features, and plain crap, that there's no way to actually *USE* them. Loading a recent AOL Instant Messenger is like loading RealPlayer 8 on a computer... it's annoying as all hell. Gruh.
Meanwhile, the MacOS versions of those products are relatively clean and sleek with a good featureset and very little bloat or advertising. Go figure.
Hey, *I* use OGG damnit. It's a much better format that mp3, and the reason the hardware support is lacking is because it's a damned tough problem in hardware to deal with variable length encodings instead of the much simpler format of mp3. So the incentive isn't there for hardware manufacturers to support OGG because it's harder than MP3 and god forbid should a company ever tackle a hard problem simply because it's a better format. Much easier to just cut corners.
Let's say it is "better," even though that's pretty subjective for audiophile-type stuff. The iPod already supports Apple Lossless since Apple Lossless is (gasp) entirely lossless-- the file will be the exact same data as on the CD. Given that, OGG cannot possibly be better than Apple Lossless, at best it can be equal to it. Therefore, the iPod already supports, or exceeds, whatever benefits you'd get from encoding your music into OGG.
Wrong direction James. My concern isn't how lossless the data is (cripes, I'd use WAV if I cared). It's how much data can I fit on a storage device. Lossless implies that it's storing everything -- including "blank" space in music, which is a frequent occurance. OGG strips that out. So I've seen my mp3 collection reduced in size by almost 40% by converting to ogg, and there's no audible (to my ears) harm done.
Hmm. I use Jabber every day. But it's in a not-yet-released product :)
Joe and I are working (slowly) on a REALbasic chat client. Here is an old screenshot: http://amazon.wolfire.com/aimm2.gif Basically the idea is to create a better Adium for Windows, because Trillian and other chat clients suck. It's going to be open source and super cool. It already has support for OSCAR.
Lossless compression is still compression. I assume it's similar to runline encoding, or .gzip.
You might have a point about compression, except my storage device is a 20 GB iPod and it only has maybe 6 GB full and 4 of that is backups and I think most people have similarly-sized devices. Memory's cheap, sitting there and feeding all your CDs into your computer to encode them takes forever.
And I still wager the reason it's not supported is because 90% of the people out there use MP3, 5% use WMA and 5% use AAC, and the OGG users are maybe .005% if they're lucky. Heck, the new iPods can play video using codecs that probably shovel 20 times the data of the least efficient sound codecs, and they do alright.
But I think the main problem is that "ogg" is a horrible name. Why would I encode my music, something which sounds good, into "ogg," something that sounds like the vocalization you make when you hit your thumb with a hammer?
Heh, and my mp3 collection went from about 52 GB down to 32 GB (and yes, the music I have is either owned [from CDs] or from the public domain) when I converted it from mp3 to ogg. So trust me, the space savings can be very nice when you have a large amount of music.