I have been looking for a Linux system tray application to notify me of new mail on my GMail account. Unfortunately, all the notifiers I found either did not run on Linux, or had dependencies I was unable to meet on my machine (because I lack system administrator privileges). This is why I wrote LGMTray, a very basic GMail notifier, with very few dependencies.

After a short hiatus, I finally resumed work on my new Jabber/XMPP client project, which I christened ‘Greem’. The main goal of the project is to create a mobile Jabber/XMPP client for the Qtopia platform. The nice thing about Qtopia is that its target audience keeps on expanding: besides running on the GreenPhone (of which Trolltech was kind enough to provide me with one), Qtopia has recently been ported to the Neo 1973 (OpenMoko), and even Windows CE and Windows Mobile. In this post, I briefly describe what the expectations and the goals are for Greem, and how Psi fits into the picture.

While the last bugs are being squeezed out of Psi 0.11’s release candidates, work on 0.12 has already begun. One thing I’m excited about as a developer is the fact that we’re making the Psi codebase ’testable’, which has some nice consequences.

I noticed MOST on Debian Package of the Day earlier today. It is an advanced pager, able to display compressed and binary files, supporting multiple windows, … Because I couldn’t find it in Fink, I created a new package for it.

It is time for us to be honest: the reason Psi has not had a release in the past year and a half is because we have secretly been working on one of the most controversial and least implemented features in the Jabber world: XEP-0076 (Malicious Stanzas). We have allocated two full-time developers for achieving this: Machekku has done the groundbreaking work, implementing the main processing loop, statistic gathering, and user interfaces for this type of stanzas, whereas I have been concentrating mostly on backend issues. Although our work is still in a highly experimental stage, we decided to release the full source code in order to get useful feedback from the community. Besides a Psi implementation, we also provide an Openfire server-side implementation for malicious stanza tagging as an extension of the content filter, targeted at fixing non-XEP-0076-compliant behavior of entities.

We recently made Psi’s dialogs related to account creation, registration, and modification a bit easier to use. The account registration process is now a wizard-like dialog, where a user first needs to select a server (from a centralized on-line list), and then needs to provide the information requested by the server (according to XEP-0077: In-Band Registration). We have also introduced new default settings that should avoid the need to tweak any account settings when adding an existing account. This means that you should be able to log into any XMPP server (including Google Talk) just by entering your JID and password. Some more details and screenshots below.