words by patrick

UPDATE: This is now out of date! Get the latest version by clicking on the Adium Time Zone Plugin page in the sidebar.

Today I’m announcing the preview release of my Adium Time Zone Plug-in. This plug-in adds functionality to Adium by letting you set time zones for each individual contact. Once set, you can view the local time of the contact in their tooltip.

It looks something like this:

It’s a preview release because I’m interested in soliciting feedback as to it’s implementation before I make it totally public and tell all my friends to download it. Please try it out and let me know what you think and how it can be improved.

Note of interest:

• The city names are all taken from Apple’s NSTimeZone class. I assume I could add more, but it might be hectic/ugly to manage two separate lists; a real one and one that just maps it’s contents to the real one.
• I tried to follow the implementation of ESAuthorizationWindowController, if you were wondering why I did some of the things I did in the controller class.
• I plan on writing out a How-to on writing your own Adium plug-ins soon, so watch for that.

The plug-in can be downloaded here: Adium Time Zone Plug-in

The source (GPL Licensed) can be downloaded here: Adium Time Zone Plug-in Source

Enjoy and please let me know what you think!

I’d like to offer a congratulatory hand to all the developers of Adium, as today they celebrate their 1.0 Release.

1.0 is a really big step. Software is constantly changing, being updated, fixed, and altered. In a world where more and more things are being released with a “beta” tag attached, it takes a lot of balls to call something 1.0. It’s saying “Okay, this is done. I feel good enough about this that I am ready to share this with everyone.” Sadly, very few software titles ever reach this stage.

I started watching the Adium project in my freshman year of college, 2003, when 0.5 had just been released. It was actually one of the first open source applications I ever used that interested me enough that I actually downloaded the source code. At that time, I wasn’t even a computer science major and I had no idea what I was looking at. Luckily, Adium had awesome support for Xtras and I was able to write a few scripts for it (ShowIP, VinDieselFacts, and ThingsThatDontExist, all defunct now) with only my meager technical know-how.

I switched majors (my entire program, actually) in second year to computer science, owing partly to Adium’s influence. I’m now in my senior year and I’m happy to say that through 3 years of learning how to program in C, Java, Prolog, Lisp, Miranda, and probably a few other languages, I’ve finally been able to contribute code to Adium. I was able to fix a small bug (#1235) that sometimes caused users to accidentally try to add a contact twice. Although it’s only a few lines of code, and I actually still need to fix some of it, it’s something. It’s a start.

It takes a lot to contribute to open source projects. You have to find time between classes, friends, jobs, the opposite sex, and other social influences to sit down and teach yourself a ton of information that nobody ever asked you to learn. And not just the source code, but sometimes entirely new languages (like Objective-C, in my case) that the source code is written in. In a period of life where all I really do is try to keep up with the things I’m suppose to be learning, that’s a hard thing to do. It’s no wonder there are so few other students that do this sort of thing. The amount of discipline, work ethic, and downright intelligence of many of the core Adium team members astounds me, but I think I’m starting to see why they do it.

It’s so freaking cool to know that some code I wrote, however minute and insignificant it my seem, will be running in hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people’s computers. To know that I had (or will have) a direct impact on that many people is really awe-inspiring. The alluring problem-solving aspects of programming still apply, but to know and feel the solutions applied to such mass audience is almost intoxicating.

I hope to fix my current patch and continue to create even more. I have ideas in the pipeline for projects of my own, and I hope that one day I can be as proud of my work as the developers of Adium are of theirs today.

Thanks to ThisService, I’ve turned the previously mentioned ROT13 ruby script into a system-wide Mac OS X service. Simply select the text you want encrypted/decrypted, hit CMD-Shift-R or select ROT13 from the service menu, and your text will be ROT13-ified.

Thanks, Jesper!

Dowload it here: ROT13service.zip