Adium

Hi. This is applmak, and I'm putting together a page on the history of Adium's development for a google tech talk I'm doing. Feel free to add your favorite anecdotes, or facts, or figures.

Development Timeline

2001

  1. Mac OS X is released into the wild

2002

  1. Adam Iser begins development on cocoaime
    1. It supports only the AIM protocol, using the TOC library.
  2. cocoaime becomes AdIuM CK, and the CK gets dropped quickly.
  3. Adium 1.0 (no relation to Adium X's 1.0 which would also be called Adium 1.0) is released
  4. 10/19/02: Last official release of the original Adium. Evan Schoenberg and a number of FunMac Forums members continue work, producing the Adium Community Releases.
  5. Continuing improvements are made culminating in an 1.6.5.05 release.
  6. Work is started on "Adium 2.0," a complete rewrite of Adium intended for team-based development. Connectivity is through the AIM TOC library, an experimental AIM OSCAR library with support for advanced features like buddy icons, and a custom MSN library which never quite works.

2003

  1. 10/03: Initial 'libgaim' connectivity is added by Colin Barrett, with instrumental help from Christian Hammond of the Gaim team and early major contributions from Scott Lamb and Evan. libgaim extracts the core of Gaim and turns into a library Adium can use. This marks the beginning of the modern Adium in many senses, as it allows focus to shift to Adium itself rather than underlying protocols.
  2. 12/28/03: MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Napster support via libgaim is added by Evan during a long car ride. Adium is officially multi-protocol.

2004

  1. 4/6/04: Adium 2.0 is renamed to Adium X and released at version 0.50 because "it's halfway to a 1.0 product." Nearly 10,000 people download and use Adium X 0.50.

2005

  1. 8/05: Work begins on Adium X 1.0, with major architectural changes, while development continues simultaneously on the 0.xx series.

2006

  1. 4/06: Adium X 0.89.1 released. Over 1 million downloads!

2007

  1. 2/07: Adium X is renamed to Adium, as the X is passé. Adium 1.0 is released after a year and a half of effort. There are therefore two versions of Adium 1.0 separated in time by 5 years!

Anecdotes

Be sure to credit your stories! -applmak