ptyaim / News: Recent posts

This new release of ptyaim features improvements to the Oscar plugin.

Since the TOC server has mysteriously died, I have written a new OSCAR plugin for ptyaim in the last few days. Here it is. Also in this 0.5.6 release is the ability to initiate IRC DCC sessions, as opposed to only being able to connect to sessions initiated by others. This, along with some build fixes on Tru64 and NetBSD.

Some bug fixes, and a new feature: the /toggle command toggles the visibility of your list.

Also, GNU make is no longer a build requirement. The build scripts now work with BSD and SysV makes.

There are some UI changes here. First, the height of the input field is now 1 row; it is now scrollable. Second, there's a "status bar" with a clock, the complete name of the current buffer, and, it will tell you how many message buffers are marked unread. This way, you can still see you have messages, even if your buddy list is taller than the terminal height.

Other than that, there are a few bugfixes, mostly for Solaris, and some general re-organizing.... read more

Hello world,

I kind of got annoyed with ptyaim not resizing itself when switching terminals, so I made it properly handle a change in terminal size. Since this can be a portability problem I have personally gone through and made sure it works correctly on Solaris, 3 kinds of BSDs, Linux, and Mac OS X. Enjoy!

Note that this release only applies to Unix. AFAIK Windows doesn't support this feature.

No text.

The IRC plugin has been completely rewritten. It supports DCC CHAT/SEND/XMIT, but cannot initiate DCC servers, only connect to them. (Sending files / initiating chat may be coming later.)

There are many bugfixes in the TOC plugin and in libptyaim aswell.

For debian/i386/unstable:

put in /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://mail.rochester.edu/~asveikau/src unstable main

# apt-get update
# apt-get install ptyaim ptyaim-toc

I am glad to report that I have just completely rewritten most of ptyaim. Plugins are now separate processes and communicate with ptyaim through a pipe. This allows for better organization of the somewhat messy code. The IRC plugin was dropped, but it may re-appear later.

I've posted a lot of fixes and changes that I've been tinkering with and have been sitting on my computer for a long time. From a user perspective it's nothing major. I fixed scripting, so I hope that it's easier for other people to understand where I'm coming from with that.

I started writing what I thought would become IRC DCC support. It doesn't work yet. I hope that it will, some day.

One of these days, I'm going to package ptyaim's dynamic buffer library, dynbuf, as a separate library. C programmers, you will love it. I think so, anyway.

Haven't made any binaries yet, but here is a new ptyaim.

One big new feature is that you can now hook shell scripts into ptyaim. Ptyaim will feed a script its events on the command line.

The IRC plugin has been greatly improved, now with CTCP support.

You must now move your .ptyaimrc files to ~/.ptyaim/rc.

Enjoy.

Made a silly mistake in the configure script again. Sorry. Now works on OBSD again.

Fixed build on Solaris and IRIX. Other fixes here and there, too. I even got this to build on A/UX, which is based on SVR2.

If anyone can tell me anything about certain package formats (I.E. IRIX inst, or whatever the hell Solaris uses, or BSD stuff ...), I'm interested in making lots of ptyaim packages.

Somebody requested an online help command, so I wrote one. Someone else asked if they could use ptyaim without ncurses, so I made libptyaim, which lets you use the plugin interface outside of ptyaim, for your own programs. (For this, see doc/PLUGINS. There is a long description and an example.)

Other than that, some bug fixes.

Thanks to anyone and everyone who uses ptyaim, and thank you for your suggestions.

Last release had a few quirks and my previous attempt to fix 'configure' on OpenBSD had failed, so now it works.

New tarball. configure works better. Hope it does.

This release is mainly to fix build problems, but also adds new features like aliasing and IPv6 support of all things.

Binaries to come.

This new tarball helps portability. ptyaim no longer requires GCC to compile, and will work with several commercial Unix compilers.

Remember when I said ptyaim wouldn't run on Mac OS X? I lied. It does not compile out of the box, but a binary is provided. (it requires dlcompat from OpenDarwin.)

Here is ptyaim 0.2. ptyaim now supports AIM chat rooms, and IRC. There are also a lot of bugfixes and ptyaim is closer to doing the "Right Thing" at all times.

I've also looked into porting to Mac OS X. Don't expect this. Mac OS X has no dlsym(), but that is easily wrapped. The real problem, though, is that Mac OS X does not have poll(). So don't expect ptyaim to run on it soon.

This follow-up release includes minor fixes and makes ptyaim more portable. It now runs out of the box on Solaris and Tru64.

It has come to my attention that using ICQ with ptyaim is very simple:

/l toc
/$ OSCAR_SERVER login.icq.com
/login "My UIN" "password"

See also the screenshots page of the website, which also has an example of this: http://ptyaim.sourceforge.net/ss.shtml

There is an undeniably sexy new client on the AIM playing field: ptyaim!

Okay, well, here is my AIM client. Try it out and give me some thoughts.