New Icon

With a new name, Monal also has a new icon also designed by Ayush Pokharel.

Adium themes are in

As luck would have it, there was a critical bug in the version of Monal submitted to the App store and  I pulled it before it was approved.  While it was in the approval queue i managed to get the Adium themes working correctly so it will be in 1.02.

appending the following to the change log:
21. New faster and better looking message display that is compatible with Adium themes.

1.02 submitted for approval

Monal 1.02 has been submitted to the app store and should be approved in the next few days.   This is the final change log  for this version.  I this is a substantial upgrade and will post a FAQ for this version soon. 

1. Faster click response on buddy list

2. added an arrow to show buddies are clickable in chat log 

3. added blue arrows to see expanded status message and other details of  buddies in buddylist

4. "away"  users are greyed out

5. Away, invisible  and message Settings persistent between sessions

6. can delete conversation logs for budddies

7. xmpp protocol handling more efficient

8. new notification engine,  much faster loading, more responsive UI and lower CPU usage/better battery life

9. new in application account manager

10. Landscape mode for chats. 

11. option to play a sound when a message arrives (iphone only)

12. the entire program does not freeze when loading many buddy icons  the first time

13. Edit button added for buddy list to remove buddies

14. Edit button added to chat history to remove history

15. badge on the tab bar at the bottom will indicate unread messages 

16. offline messages. If the server supports it when  messages are sent while sworim is closed, they will be sent to you when you open

17. Smoother/cleaerer  buddy icon appearance 

18. The new message indicator is in a grey oval like in mail. 

19. copy and paste enabled  in chat windows

20. Reconnects seamlessly when a dropped connection is detected

One more thing..

Well, not exactly. This unfortunately doesn't look like it is ready for prime time. One of those features that's so cool  I  really wish I had it ready for the 1.02 release.    OSX users will see the screenshots below and immediately know what it is.  For everyone else, the gist of it is I have support for Adium  message themes.  Adium  is the main IM client on OSX.  All of the message themes you see on the Adium extras page should  now work.   I really like Renkoo and Stockholm.  The screenshots below are of the Stockholm running on the iPhone. This will likely be the default theme in future versions.  Despite how cool it is, the reason I don't think I can include it in this upcoming release it is just not as fast as the existing message display and speed is kind of important here.  There are also little bugs with the keyboard display and auto scrolling to the newest message at the bottom.  Hopefully it will be good enough to be in 1.03. 

Screenshot dump!

These are the shots that will appear in the iTunes store.

 

Say hello to Monal

1.02 is now feature complete. I will not be adding anything new to it before release.  The only thing left is to  optimize the code and check for bugs.  A release should come soon. 


I am changing  the name of the program  to Monal  starting with this release. SworIM was just randomly chosen one afternoon when I originally wrote the program.  The name comes from swor (pronounced  like swore) which is the  Nepalese word for voice. I think Monal keeps the same theme  and is unique but should be much easier to say. SworIM is pretty much a translation of Talk (as in Google Talk) with IM tacked on the end and not very creative.  It worked out well because it was unique,  It   also got  mispronounced to sound like soar.   This led to the bird icon, which amusingly  as a pheasant  is not an animal likely to soar  any time soon. Why the bird theme? I want Monal to eventually  be like these guys and these . With better general XMPP support it's not really just  a google talk program anymore.

SworIM has been around for just under a year and the name will probably  live on underneath  in the library that it uses and in the name of this blog.  I'll be gradually changing  the name over everywhere. Hopefully I wont regret it when I lose some traffic as it transitions. 

New Account Manager and iPod Touch Users

Sorry iPod touch users, OS 3 will be required for the next release. There are now definitely things in the program that simply don't work the same in OS2. Its been a while since OS3 came out, so I hope most iPod touch users have upgraded. I'll keep trying to see if  I can redo things to work in OS2.

There is a new account manager in the application. This should address the most common complaint about the program, people cant find the settings app. It will also sets the groundwork  for future multi account/ multi protocol support.

Gray message indicators

Sure it is something small, but the fact that the message indicators didn't look like the ones in mail was something that bugged me. This is mainly due to the fact that uitablecell view in the iPhone actually doesnt have a built in system of showing that badge.  It wasn't too hard to add one manually though. It not only makes the app closer to the standard UI, but the clear indicator should help see the number of messages when using the app.  You may notice that the buddy icon is smoother, no more jaggies seen in the screen shots further down on this page.  The anti aliasing filter was also added recently.

Offline messages and little icons

Its not exactly push notification -- which will likely never be in sworim because its not connecting to the server through a proxy -- however if you xmpp server supports offline messages (such as google talk)  then you will receive them when you open the application.
On the improved UI front,  there's a notification badge added to the chat tab when new messages come in showing the number of unread messages.

Clicking on he blue arrow near a buddys name on the right will also show a detail  page for that buddy so its possible to read longer status messages

Digest-MD5 will not be supported

I began work on the DIGEST-MD5  authentication mechanism and realized that it was recently deprecated from the XMPP protocol. Considering how much trouble it is to implement and varying implementations on different servers that might lead to failed logins, I've decided not to add this login mechanism. This souldn't impact most people as the preferred method of logging in these days is SASL PLAIN +SSL connection, which SworIM has supported from day one.
SworIM does detect what mechanisms are supported when logging into a server, so I will code it so that if it encounters a server where SASL PLAIN is not supported it will have an error saying that is what the problem is.

More updates

I feel I probably owe it to everyone to update this blog with new features as I am adding them considering how long it has been since both a release and new posts here.

I've been trying to get new style SSL working correctly. This would be SSL on port 5222 that many people have requested. I am about 95% there, I know how it works and have written code to initialize it, unfortunately, I also realized that the built in apple objects I am using are probably not compatible with the kind of communication it is doing.  It seems I cant create a secure stream after already talking in the clear on the same BSD socket and port 5222 requires clear text communication before starting SSL.  I'll  have to try a new approach.

A couple of more things have been added to the change log:


11. option to play a sound when a message arrives (iphone only)
12. the program does not freeze when loading many buddy icons  the first time
13. Edit button added for buddy list to remove buddies
14. Edit button added to chat history to remove history

SworIM 1.02 is coming

Sorry for the lack of updates in the past few months. 1.02 is currently being developed. This should be a fairly big update that addresses many of the issues that were raised with 1.01. I am working hard on improving the XMPP protocol underneath in addition to the presentation. In particular, Im trying to improve the compatibility (more servers, more authentication methods) and eliminate crashing bugs. Here is the current change log. This will grow as I have a rather large list of things to fix before the next update, hopefully it will be worth it.

1. Faster click response on buddy list
2. added an arrow to show buddies are clickable in chat log
3. added blue arrows to see expanded status message and other details of buddies in buddylist
4. "away" users are greyed out
5. built with OS 2.2.1 as the base for ipod touch compatibility
6. can delete conversation logs for budddies
7. xmpp protocol handling more efficient
8. new notification engine, much faster loading, more responsive UI and lower CPU usage/better battery life
9. new in application account manager
10. Landscape mode for chats.