Xblaze

The next version of Xblaze iPhone will contain a major new feature that has been asked about since its release. That ferature is Clan Support.

Clan support is definitely being worked on for Xblaze iPhone and is getting pretty close to being releasable. The current implementation is currently integrating the clan as a group within your friends list, kind of like a custom friend group, but not managed by you.

I have a better way to display the clan groups (and it’ll be sexy, I promise), so don’t get attached to this method, this screen shot is just to show that clans are working so far!

You may notice the “Communities” tab at the bottom-middle of the screen. If you don’t know, Xfire don’t call clans “clans” anymore. They’re called Communities now, so that’s the official title. And that’s where the better clan (community) interface is going to go.

Hope you’re excited!

PS. At some point – when I have time – I will merge all these new Xfire features that are in the iPhone version back into the Adium plugin. I’m sorry it’s taking so long, but all my time is being used up by the iPhone version and real life.

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.