Lately a lot of work has been done with the BeOS IM Kit, mainly by magnussoft. But also fixes have been submitted by Michael Davidson (alias slaad) and Andrea Anzani (alias xeD).
Today Bernd Korz published a new article on his blog about their integration of the BeOS IM Kit into the upcoming version of ZETA. The development team behind ZETA has been making a new graphical frontend for the kit, with their new chat window, buddy list and the integration of the settings in to the ZETA Preferences. It appears to ICO that no changes have been made to the im_server itself, by magnussoft.
Update by DaaT: According to Bernd Korz, changes have also been made to im_server, but they are ZETA specific, as in making it work with their Contacts app.
Michael Davidson recently blogged that he added some changes to the source tree to prevent MSN from occasionally crashing on login, and made these changes available to magnussoft.
Andrea Anzani published a change in the XMPP/Google Talk protocol that are essential for many of the European users of the IM Kit. Google's Gmail trademark this week suffered a severe blow in EU as the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market ruled against the search giant's use of the Gmail name in all of the EU countries, according to Daniel Giersch, the man who opposed the company. Appearantely the Harmonization Office has supported his claim that "Gmail" and his own "G-mail" are confusingly similar. G-mail is a German service that provides a "gmail.de" email address, but also allows for a sort of "hybrid mail" system in which documents can be sent electronically, printed out by the company, and delivered in paper format to local addresses. Google also ran into problems with the Gmail trademark in the U.K. back in 2005, and reached a settlement with the company Independent II Research in October that year. Since then British users of Gmail have gotten googlemail.com as their e-mail domain. Daniel Giersch recently tried to register the trademark G-mail in Norway, but the registration was rejected and the Norwegian users of Gmail will still be allowed to use gmail.com as their e-mail domain.
The Gmail protocol in the IM Kit has until now been hard coded to only accept gmail.com addresses, but with Andrea's code submit also users of the IM Kt with googlemail.com addresses can successfully use the IM Kit.
The IM Kit still remains outdated, as it still doesn't support file transfers, group chats, VoIP and video conferences. Furthermore the IM Kit only has a limited implementation of the Jabber protocol. An eight year old protocol that is nearly dead today, as the IETF (the main standards body for the Internet) approved the core Jabber protocols in 2004 under the name XMPP. magnussoft and the developers of the IM Kit should remove both the Jabber and the Google Talk protocol, and together port libjingle. Google has with libjingle chosen to follow the XMPP specifications and the lib was recently released its v0.4. The work would bring us most of the lacking features.
