Xblaze

Xblaze 1.0.3 is available on the download page. Go grab it.

New in this version:

• Fixed a bug that prevented Xblaze from connecting when Adium starts if you check the “Connect when Adium opens” option.
• Fixed an issue where Friends of Friends were randomly bring shown in the contact list. Current solution is to not show any friends of friends at all. A friends of friends solution will be worked out in a later release.

Hey guys. Another late night, 04:57am right now…

Xblaze 1.0.2 has just been uploaded and is ready for download.

New in this version:

• Contact list has been optimised – should build and update much faster than previously.
• Server info is now shown if available in the tooltip for contacts.

Also, I have fixed the issue in the forums that prevented people from posting new topics, so remember, if you have any issues, e-mail me or post in the forum and I’ll get back to you.

Hey guys, just a heads up that Xblaze 1.0.1 is up on the downloads page. Go grab it!

• Xblaze will now show typing notifications when your friends are typing, and send typing notifications to your friends when you are typing.
• Plugged a few minor memory leaks

It’s 5:08am. I’ve just committed the typing notifications code to SVN. Sleeeepy.

I’ll release an update tomorrow at some point that will include the typing notifications support.

The incoming typing notes, (those that tell you who’s typing), were simple. A few short lines of code and they were working. But the outgoing typing notes, (those that tell your friends when you’re typing), were a lot more involved. The MacFire library didn’t have a packet to represent a typing notification, so I had to write one before writing the logic to send it.

I also learned something a little odd about the way Xfire handles typing notifications. According to all the documentation I’ve read about the Xfire protocol, the typing notification packet is the same packet that contains messages and message acknowledgments. The difference between these packets is the data structure within, their IDs are all the same. With that said, the typing notification packet contains a field aptly named ‘typing’ which represents an integer.
The documentation says this is treated like a boolean, 1 for typing, 0 for not typing. So my initial inclination was to send the packet with a 1 when a user is typing, and then again with a 0 when they finish typing.
I was wrong. This caused the typing notification to keep being displayed even after a message was sent. My only guess is that Xfire (for Windows) ignores this boolean value, and just assumes that any typing note packet that arrives means that the user is typing… Either that, or the field isn’t intended to be used as a boolean. We shall most likely never know.

Good night.

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.

Holy cow! An Update?!

Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present to you Xblaze 1.0.

I’ve rewritten Xblaze from the ground up as a brand new Adium plugin using the MacFire Xfire communication library (thanks to Archon). This means no more XfireLib. While XfireLib served Xblaze pretty well, it was responsible for 90% of its problems. Since XfireLib seems to have ceased active development, I decided it was time to move away from it.

Xblaze 1.0 requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Adium 1.4 beta

So what’s new?

• Completely rewritten from the ground up
• No more XfireLib
  • Xblaze now uses the foundation that MacFire was built on (Thanks Archon!)
• No regression
  • Xblaze supports all the features that it did in previous versions
• Multiple Accounts
• Tightly integrated with Adium
• Search for other Xfire users

Head on over to the Download page and try it out.