SAPO Messenger for Mac
One of my favorite projects in the last years is finally public. The first public version of SAPO Messenger for Mac, a Jabber client tied to the SAPO Messenger community.
The client has both English and Portuguese and given that most Portuguese Mac users have English as their default language, we choose to ignore the settings of the International preferences pane for now and force the Portuguese locale. To switch back to English, do this:
- in the Finder, select the SAPO Messenger icon, from the Applications folder;
- Use the Get Info menu option (Cmd-I shortcut);
- From the Languages section, enable English.
You have to do this after every upgrade, but we will probably change this in a future version.
You can register an account at the SAPO Messenger registration page, its free. Its Portuguese only for now, but it should be self evident. I'll try and do a a small screencast about that part.
The cool features that I think make this an excellent Jabber client for the Mac:
- native Cocoa interface;
- a rock solid Psi core (kudos the Psi team, Justin Karneges, Kevin Smith and Remko Torçon in particular);
- a multi-contact implementation: just drag all the contacts of the same person on top of each other;
- a search-as-you-type roster: amazingly useful with big rosters;
- Growl notifications;
- SOCKS5 File Transfer;
- SMS text messaging to Portuguese networks;
- and lots of other small things.
All in all, it was a great year fine tuning the first set of features. I'm particularly in love with the search-as-you-type roster (and the internal versions are already a lot better :) ).
There are some features that are not present because we haven't decided how to do them right. Two examples are tabbed chat and address book integration. We don't know if they will appear in a future version or not.
Other features are not present because we are still building them:
- multi-user chat support;
- better handling of offline and pending messages.
So download and give it a whirl. If you need to add a local user, feel free to add [email protected].
One last thing: during the last year, we have had the privilege to have an amazing Cocoa programmer in the team. He single handed took the project into his hands, used the core framework and C++-to-Coocoa bridge developed by the Psi team, and built all the Cocoa goodies that you will see. kudos to João Pavão of Critical Software. This was a team effort of course, but some elements just stand out.
Last but not the least: expect a GPL source code release soon :).
Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!