words by patrick

Good news: The Adium Time Zone Plugin is now out. I hoped to have it out by the end of the week, and (I think) I squashed the last two bugs that were preventing me from releasing, so off it goes! I made a page for it that I will keep updated with the latest version and other news. The BSD licensed source code is also there if you want to check it out.

I’m proud of the code. I’m not super proud of the model, in fact I’m sure it will become something that I will look back on one day and say “What the hell was I thinking?!”. I’ll probably refactor it in the future, it’s just that I’ve held off on releasing this for long enough, and with my finals looming I was scared that If I didn’t release by my self-imposed deadline of this week then I wouldn’t have time to work on it again in a while.

I hope you like it. I hope it doesn’t sink your Adium. Please send me some feedback if it does (or if it doesn’t). Thanks!

UPDATE: This is now out of date!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!

UPDATE 3/08/07: Bart has updated SSH Keychain to 0.8 and made it a UB. Thanks Bart!

The development of SSHKeychain, my favourite little SSH key manager seems to have stalled for some reason or another. Unfortunately, their last release is a PPC build, meaning it has to run under Rosetta on all the fancy new Intel machines Apple is shipping these days. This is a pain, since it’s actually the last app wasn’t running natively one my Macbook Pro.

I’ve noticed that they actually updated the source in svn to build as a universal binary (way back in February), but never bothered rebuilding and distributing it. Luckily, since open source is really great, I checked out a fresh copy and built such a universal binary for myself. I thought I’d share the results, to make it easy for those who don’t want to install Xcode tools and build it themselves:

Download SSHKeychain r95 - Universal Binary Don’t use this! See Update!

You should really checkout and build yourself if you want to make sure it’s secure and everything, but if you trust me, this is much easier.

Thanks a ton to the SSHKeychain guys for doing their thing. I highly appreciate this piece of software.