Adium 1.2.7 is now available. It’s just like Adium 1.2.6 except without the major XMPP problem which snuck into that release.

This just in! Adium 1.2.6 available less than 24 hours after an ICQ network upgrade rendered previous versions unable to connect. Credit goes to our good friends over at Pidgin for fixing libpurple, our mutual services library, so quickly. Libpurple 2.4.3 also fixes several issues with the Yahoo!, Yahoo! Japan, and QQ instant messaging services.

A few other bugs are fixed in Adium 1.2.6, too. A bug which has been around since Adium 0.50 which caused “Contact Came Back” to be displayed sometimes when contacts would sign off has finally been fixed - a single ! was in the wrong place! Also, one of the most common crashes in 1.2.x has been corrected, and message windows will once again remember their position on Mac OS X 10.4. You can check out the version history for all the details.

We’re hard at work on Adium 1.3, which is going to be an awesome release. You can check out the beta or learn about contributing time, code, or money. Remember, Adium is a free, open source, volunteer effort.

Our site and code host NetworkRedux and our download host CacheFly rock.

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Adium 1.3 Beta. You can download it from the beta page or enable “Update to beta versions when available” in the Adium General preferences.

New in Adium 1.3: A brand new, gorgeous Contact Inspector which brings together all a contact’s information in one place – coalescing combined contacts’ information and accessing your Apple Address Book to give you at-a-glance information; Facebook Chat; iPhone 2.0-style filtering search in the Standard Contact List; major performance improvements; and well over 150 enhancements and bug improvements from the Adium team alone, plus major updates from our friends at libpurple and Growl. See the Beta page for the full details.

Please test, enjoy, give us feedback and help further refine Adium 1.3, and get involved!

Jesper informs me of a website called This Peanut Looks Like A Duck.

This site, like so many, originates with a single post, containing a photo of a mis-shapen peanut next to a rubber ducky. The site’s creators have followed that post with a succession of photos of other objects that look like various kinds of birds—mostly peanuts, and mostly ducks.

Thanks, Jesper. And if any of you have any other duck sightings to report, feel free to contact us.

Adium user Daniel Versteeg wrote in to tell us that his girlfriend, after inaugurating a fresh jar of mustard, discovered that she’d inadvertently carved the shape of Adiumy out of it:

He sent us this picture (which he took with his iPhone) partly to ask you whether you had any Duck sightings of your own.

So, how about it? Have you seen Adiumy (or his silhouette, at least) anywhere? (We will, of course, need photographic evidence, to document his journey.)

We released Adium 1.2.4 today. This is a minor release including improvements to several IM services (AIM direct connect, Yahoo! file transfer, Google Talk buddy icons, ICQ status notes, and MSN contact visibility), as well as crash fixes, visual improvements, and the long-requested ability to make the contact list completely transparent. The full change list is, as always, available on our support wiki.

As phatmonkey commented on Evan’s post (so swiftly that s/he posted that comment before I had even opened up the New Post window!), Google just extended the student application deadline for Google Summer of Code by one week.

The new deadline is 2008-04-07. If you want to be a student in GSoC this year, you need to have your application in by that date.

Remember, you can apply with any idea you want—you aren’t limited to our list of ideas. We encourage original ideas that we never thought of.

As of Adium 1.2.4, the Adium binary is signed. This means that our cryptographic signature is embedded in official releases of the application, and that any changes to that bundle will invalidate the signature and thereby alert your system (assuming it is running Mac OS X 10.5 or later) that the integrity of the program is compromised. One of the most obvious advantages of this besides basic security is that you should no longer be prompted to allow new versions to access your keychain items; the security layer can tell with confidence that Adium 1.2.5 is signed by the same folks who signed Adium 1.2.4 and that it should be allowed without question.

If you mess with the Adium binary in any way, you will invalidate the signature, and access to secure resources — specifically keychain items where your passwords are stored — will be disallowed by Mac OS X. Don’t do that.

A prime example (seen in our IRC support channel recently) are the programs such as Monolingual designed to “slim down” Universal Binary (a.k.a. “fat binary”) programs which have both PPC and Intel code. Removing part of the code invalidates the signature. This leads to warning messages.

Apple is encouraging all developers to sign their applications; this won’t be a (non-)problem restricted to Adium. Since only copies of Adium built by the Adium team in our super-secret underground lab are signed, you can of course make your own build and change it however you want — this includes removing one architecture or the other.

While you’re at it, get involved in development!

This year, Adium has accepted three student proposals for Google Summer of Code. One will add a valuable new feature, while two relate to automated testing, which will both improve Adium’s reliability and allow us to spend more time working on new features and less time fixing regressions. Why two projects related to testing? Part of it is just that both students were pretty amazing, but there are strategic reasons as well.

Branton’s project will take the relatively conservative path of extending our existing testing infrastructure; this may include creating Mock Objects for much of Adium’s internals. A difficult task, but one that will almost certainly be beneficial. At the same time as extending our test system, Branton will also be documenting our code, which should make it more accessible to new contributors and easier for us to work with.

Contrasting with this, Arcadio intends to take a different approach; creating a brand new testing framework implementing the Behavior Driven Development approach, and applying it to Adium. If successful, it will give us and other Mac software projects an entirely new set of tools to approach testing with, but it is a somewhat riskier project.

For our only non-testing related project this year, Geoffrey plans to create a framework implementing something similar to Apple’s data detectors feature in Leopard. This will do textual analysis of all messages and use that information to provide contextually relevant actions you can do. Even better, the plan is to make this framework usable in other apps, so this functionality should begin showing up all over the place.

Good news, Facebook fans! I’ve just finished adding Facebook Chat support to Adium for the next release