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iChat Service Plugins

S

S_Chandler

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 4, 2005
24
0
Hello

I didn't see a thread devoted to this topic, and info on it is scarce anywhere, so I thought I would start one.

I'm really looking forward to the new iChat service plugins. I prefer iChat over other IM apps, but I've always missed the lack of MSN and other service protocols. Lion's iChat adds the option for 3rd party plugins, and I wish I had any development knowledge to make my own, but I don't.

So this thread should be a repository for service plugin links and info.

First, is there any knowledge of anyone developing plugins? I imagine developers contributing to Adium or other all-in-one IM apps would be interested in it, since they already have knowledge of the various protocols. Has Apple released an official API for writing iChat plugins?

Second, from digging around the Gold Master release it looks like the new Yahoo IM integration is done through a service plugin itself. I haven't tried yet, but I bet if you were to delete the plugin, the Yahoo options in iChat would just disappear.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

First and formost, Lion is under NDA until it's released, so if anyone is making an IM plug-in, they'll have to keep it quiet for now.

I, also, am intrigued by the promise of using iChat for other IM services. It should prove interesting.
 
I'd imagine most of these plug-ins are going to be for connecting to chat servers for barebones text messaging. There isn't exactly a lot of standardization in the chat client world, and programs like Adium and Trillian often don't even attempt to tap into features like video and voice chat. Sometimes, they can't even properly manage group lists / blocked contacts.
 
Takuro said:
I'd imagine most of these plug-ins are going to be for connecting to chat servers for barebones text messaging. There isn't exactly a lot of standardization in the chat client world, and programs like Adium and Trillian often don't even attempt to tap into features like video and voice chat. Sometimes, they can't even properly manage group lists / blocked contacts.
Click to expand...

True, unless it's an official plugin (made by Skype, MSN etc), and I doubt those will ever happen, it will probably just be basic text support. But personally that's all I would be looking for, and being able to see who is online, availability status, things like that. Truth be told, I probably would be using Adium if it just had a background/menu bar daemon feature like iChat. I only launch the actual iChat app when I want to send/receive a message.
 
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I agree with you there, Facebook and MSN and other plugins would be great. I've been searching for some, but as of yet, no luck...
 
The only plugin I've seen so far is from Apple as sample code, and thats for IRC. It's rather basic but works, though I'd like to see an IRC plugin with a few more options.

If you want to try it go to the Mac OS X Developer Library, then go to IMServicePlugin, you have to compile it yourself though it has instructions.
 
Currently using Jabber to run my Facebook and Gchat over iChat. No problems now (although it was a little glitchy a month ago or so with Facebook, refused to connect.)
 
No problem. I stumbled upon it a while back and thought it was about the most helpful thing I've ever read on my Facebook. Lol. :)
 
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