KMess announcement: KMess is switching to Tcl/Tk

[Sjors]

Too bad... We had another discussion and we're back at KDE/Qt for now

[fontknocker]

...time for a fork perhaps?

(kidding! hehe)

[RealNC]

Good job. Here's the video in HD (720p) so you can see the awesome details better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a7u4WoCgZ8&fmt=22

PS:
Yes, a fork is in order

[Sjors]

...time for a fork perhaps?

I'm waiting for TMess, MMess, GMess and all the others to appear...

[Thunder Teaser]

Well, they actually made a fork of Sapphire aMSN skin!

[ralesk]

...time for a fork perhaps?

I'm waiting for TMess, MMess, GMess and all the others to appear...

Mess#

MessE also! for e17

[elpreto]

I think this is a little offensive........ i wish aMSN people don't read this.

[kakaroto]

Hey, aMSN lead developer here...
yeah, it is indeed quite offensive... I understand the whole 'april fools' joke, but I don't see why it's targeted directly to aMSN in order to make fun of us. I think you're just jealous that we have more features than you do :p
Anyways, it was a little funny, a good april's joke, but it was still misplaced in my opinion (why deliberately try to generate a war between two different projects?). A good april's joke would have been to have fun and to laugh about something KMess-related, not about a 'competing' project, don't you think ?
Anyways, just my 2 cents.
(I've just seen this, someone sent me the link, sorry for reopening an old thread)

[Valerio]

No problem about reopening old threads, it's ok.

First, I'd like to point out that this was just a little joke, no offense (and certainly not 'war') intended. If anything, it should be the tcl developers who should have been angry..
Then, I understand where the misunderstanding may be lying.
The fact that an aMSN plugin was pointed out in sarcasm probably wasn't Sjors' best idea ever, nor it was our best moment when we let it slip; but please also note that what we were only mocking a plugin whose expressed scope was annoying people ('bug buddies'), not aMSN. That plugin really stood out in your official plugin list, you got to admit it
If I had such a plugin in my project homepage, and I sure wouldn't, I'd be the first to mock myself and my own project about it.

I'd also like to point out that we're not really competing on anything, or at least.. not yet KMess is still confined on Linux+KDE grounds, unlike aMSN which is happily running on far wider pastures (even Maemo! btw, contratulations about that and your 0.98 release - if I get my hands on an N900, aMSN will be one of my first tryouts)

I hope to have cleared up the situation a bit!
-Valerio Pilo

[kakaroto]

Hi Valerio,
Thanks for the quick response.
I'm not angry and not really offended, I'm a cool guy after all :p

But it did seem like (was) an attack towards aMSN which was a bit tasteless. About the plugin that's ok, yes, its purpose is to annoy your friends :p What I found a bit over the top was doing a screencast of aMSN with a custom kmess-themed skin and saying "look how *amazing* it looks" with great sarcasm.
I like april's fools, but a kmess april fool should have been targeted at kmess, not at aMSN in my opinion (or at least, share it with us so we'd all laugh it out, instead of doing it kind of 'behind our backs').

About the competing part, I know we're not competing, that's why I put it under quotes, I never consider open source projects as competing against each other, the aMSN team (myself mainly) have helped a huge amount of people developing other third party msn clients over the years, by providing them with the knowledge we gained through reverse engineering.
About the war though, it's easy to get the fanboys into 'war mode', so it's best to not start something that could generate that... I remember when some unknown user registered pigdin.im and redirected it to amsn.. the pidgin people knew about it and didn't care (and they knew we didn't do it), and we didn't know about that pigdin.im site, until we realized that there was a huge war amongst fanboys and people insulting each other because of that 'cheap trick', thinking that the amsn did this on purpose. aMSN and Pidgin weren't at war, but the fanboys quickly started one.

Anyways, it was just a pretty bad day I guess.. we found out the aMSN page on wikipedia got deleted because "it's not notable enough" (also any page on wikipedia that had 'amsn' on it got it removed, even the "comparison of instant messenger clients"), and we're still fighting to get it back.. elive dropped aMSN in favor of emesene, I got a link to an article that disses aMSN because it's "written in java" (from a wikipedia link), and then I got the link to this april's fool.. all in one day... so it was a bit too much.

Thanks for the congratulations on the latest release and the Maemo support! With harmattan moving to QT, maybe you can get KMess for Maemo 6 too soon!

Take care,
KaKaRoTo

[Sjors]

It wasn't a personal attack, of course. However, one of the largest points people always give against aMSN is that it uses Tk, and therefore is ugly by default. That's not your fault, but people often think Tk is not the best looking toolkit out there, at least. Please consider this more like a wink to Tk, and not at all an attack on aMSN, because that's not how it was intended.

That said, merry Christmas, and may our projects co-exist in good standing

[KaKaRoTo]

hehe, yeah, I know.. being the guy behind aMSN, I know very well how much people seem to hate Tk and think it's ugly... and that just pisses me off because if you look at aMSN, the two main windows you'll ever use (the contact list and the chat windows) are all using 100% custom pixmap based widgets, there isn't a single Tk element in there (apart from the canvas on which we draw our widgets). So you only see the Tk elements of it through the menus and windows like "add contact" or "preferences" which you don't use every day...
But anyways, I know it wasn't a personal attack, it just felt like one.
Like I said, I'm not angry, just having a bad day!

Merry Christmas to you too, and may our projects co-exist in good standing :)

KaKaRoTo

[swiftscythe]

Yes, I also apologize for having offended, that was not my intention, I was just following the joke.

Merry Christmas and let's co-exist in harmony!

Sorry again

[Valerio]

Long live aMSN and KMess! Have some nice holidays, and a merry christmas!