Fun Pidgin

It's been an entire summer since I first looked into building a win32 version of Sean Egan's webkit plugin. I promised to tell Megarian first when I got it working. Here's a proof of concept screenshot of how it renders the default style.

It fails to render the images for some reason, so it looks very plain. Here's how the GoneDark style looks:

To use this, download the "webkit.zip" file release and install the contents to your Carrier installation directory, i.e. move the dll files and the "carrier" folder into "C:\Program Files\Carrier" and move the "plugins\webkit.dll" file into "C:\Program Files\Carrier\plugins". An immediately obvious bug when Carrier starts will be red x's in place of every icon. This has to do with Pidgin not expecting libgdk_pixbuf-2.0-0.dll to be present, so a stupid kludge would be to move that dll into system32. If the "Adium Message Styles" plugin still does not appear in the list, you might need the library dwmapi.dll to be in system32. Also, because I'm an idiot the plugin will only render the style found in "carrier\webkit\defaultstyle" and nothing else. So when you decide to use a style, make sure it resides in this folder and keep the plugin set to "Cloudborne (default)".

Getting the images above to render properly could be as simple as a few CSS changes, or it could involve spending months studying the webkit code and making it use functions better supported by windows and recompiling webkit along with several dependencies. Hell, maybe the Windows install I used was just broken and your images will show up right away. Ordinarily I'd try to tackle this problem some more, but I've already spent a whole summer on what many would consider a "stupid fixation" and I wouldn't know where to start. Please tell me if anyone finds a probable cause.

One thing you could try is downloading the libwebkit-1.0. file release, replacing your webkit.dll with the much smaller webkit.dll from that archive and moving libwebkit-1.0-1.dll into your installation dir. This version of the plugin (built against a dynamic webkit) would not work for me because libwebkit-1.0-1.dll was expecting different functions to be in my system libraries (user32, shell32, kernel32, etc) but with all the different versions of Windows out there, it will surely load for some people. Another idea might be building Pidgin against the latest GTK+ packages from the all-in-one bundle. This will break Windows9x compatibility but might give better results for this plugin.

What kind of citizen would I be distributing all this GPL'd software in binary form without describing the modifications I made? The WebKit.dll from http://nightly.webkit.org will not help here so to compile the plugin, you'll have to use a library from the libwebkit-1.0 file release or build your own. An official win32 build of WebKitGTK+ doesn't exist as of August 2008. The following is a howto that will take you through compiling libwebkit-1.0.a, libwebkit-1.0-1.dll, libwebkit-1.0.dll.a and webkit.dll with MinGW. If you want to attempt it, make sure you have at least one free weekend to devote. It's a pain in the ass and more trouble than it's worth.

This is a tool that allows you to install Off-The-Record for the Win32 version of Carrier.


DOWNLOAD HERE (exe & src)

The Carrier project is still here!
Today we announce our hastily prepared 2.4.3 release, to fix the recent lack of ICQ connectivity.

Edit: If you want Sametime support, Extract this over the top of your Program Files/Carrier: http://maxious.lambdacomplex.org/upload/missing-sametime-dlls.zip
Also, before compiling the source code, it's a good idea to run the autogen.sh script first.

For anyone who doesn't already know, the new name of Funpidgin is Carrier. We will slowly be moving to a new website and a new IRC channel to reflect this name change, but there remains packaging work to be done. Carrier-2.4.2 is finally ready to be released. You will find source code and Debian packages on the project site right now and RPMs should be coming shortly.

Today I was interviewed on the Fresh Ubuntu podcast to sort of clear things up as to where development is heading, and why we forked to begin with. Anyway, first 11 or so minutes contain the interview. Please excuse my crappy phone voice, Skype wasn't working.

Fresh Ubuntu interview

Come join us in the #funpidgin #carrierim channel on the FreeNode IRC network, we're happy to chat about development, ideas and bugs.

Update: You'll notice we are now using #carrierim rather than #funpidgin, but the old channel will automatically redirect you to the new channel anyway.

Just came across a story on Slashdot mentioning our little fork here and I for one would just like to welcome our new server-crashing overlords. Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.

On to more serious business, I just want to address a couple questions I saw in the comments as I quickly browsed through them. (read further...)

We're pleased to announce the opening of our very own forum here on the website. Here, you'll find forums for application support, suggestions and development, as well as how-to's and general discussion about Funpidgin. Forums are open to anonymous posters, so there's no need to register on the site (although we encourage you to do so if you wish!)