Xblaze

Ok, so I’ve submitted Xblaze 1.0 to the Adium Xtras site, and it would seem that either someone or something has submitted it to MacUpdate and Version Tracker – so I’m hoping the word is getting out there pretty quickly. Everyone tell all your friends that use a Mac and Xfire!

I also wanted to tell you guys that a 1.0.1 update will be released pretty soon with typing notifications. After that I’ll be working on getting some game/server info into the tooltips that show up for each contact when you hover your mouse over them. I think Xblaze used to do this in previous versions, so it seems it was something I missed when re-implementing everything from 0.8 into 1.0.

The way that Xblaze reads its games list has changed in this version. It’s somewhat more complicated than it used to be, and requires a little knowledge of XML to edit the list. The icons for the games are bundled into a .mar archive file, which means to add new icons requires regenerating that archive. Fortunately when Archon was developing MacFire, he wrote some handy tools to make this a little easier. They should be scriptable, and I hope to have a guide and possibly a script that will auto-generate a new games list and icons archive to be used with MacFire.

Also, some people may notice that the buddy list refreshes quite slowly when you first login. I’ll admit that the code to update the buddy list is really bad, and not in any way optimised, so I’ll be looking at how to make that a little better at some point too. Those of you with larger buddy lists will notice it more.

Don’t forget that you can e-mail me if you have any problems, and the forum has been cleaned up and ready to use too. If there are any old-skool Xblaze users out there who would like to contribute some guides on how to get Xblaze up and running for new users,  feel free to post them in the forum and I’ll sticky them.