The IM Kit is a modular framework developed to make it easy to access various IM networks (ICQ, AIM, etc) and is designed in a way it is fully integrated with BeOS. It makes use of BeOS attributes, indexes and live queries to make it as flexible as possible. With the IM Kit you can, for instance, search for all members of your family that are online and that by using the standard Find interface. You can also manage all the contacts using Tracker.

You can also see in the screenshot that the IM Kit even changes the icon color according to the user status and that change is, as expected, live.

The IM Kit was envisioned by Linus Almstron and was later "adopted" by Mikael Eiman (m_eiman). Active developers working on the project right now include Bruno G. Albuquerque (BGA), Mikael Jansson (tic) and Michael Davidson (slaad).

BeOS IM Kit is in an alpha stage of development, and in the time of writing it only supports a subset of the ICQ protocol.

If you have ideas for the project or want to contribute with code, please join the developers at #beosimkit (irc.freenode.org). The latest version of the kit can be downloaded from:

http://eiman.tv/files/imkit_alpha_6.1.zip

Press Read more... to see a screenshot of the kit.