A buncha stuff

Sorry for the late summary mail, but there's a lot that needs to be said, and 
I've become very busy recently with my exams. So:

Just a final check - initial consultations indicate there is a preference 
(won't spoil the poll by saying which way of course :-P), but I wanted to ask 
the list in general. Which do *you* prefer between:
	http://www.everybuddy.com/eb-lite/new/
	http://www.everybuddy.com/eb-lite/new2/
Once we have confirmation of what we're doing, we can actually put that site 
up. Sorry for taking so long, everyone...

As for alpha-9: Yes, it's coming. Things that need to be done first:
*	Reintegrating Yahoo from scratch
	The current Yahoo module is so unstable that I just don't run it any more. 
This needs to change. Do we have any volunteers to grab libyahoo2 from 
libyahoo2.sf.net and make a plugin of it?

Things that will happen fairly shortly after alpha-9:
*	Smileys (yes, at last!)
	Sorry for the delay on this one, but I think I know how to do them now. This 
will happen in the core over the next couple of weeks, and then in ebqt. The 
system will in fact be quite analagous to the old EB/Ayttm system, with an 
extensible name-icon bindings system. However, this one will be a bit more 
flexible, and will probably be the one used for such things as buddy images 
(when we support them), and more prosaic things such as icons rather than 
coloured blobs for the different services (hey, there's demand, and it will 
be optional).

*	File transfer
	Hot on the heels of the streaming tweaks required for smileys, file transfer 
should be just about trivial (on the core end, at any rate - Chris will need 
to implement Load and Save dialogs)

*	Merging of Edward's MinGW stuff (final version)

Hmm, actually, I just checked over the Changelog, and realised that we've made 
one hell of a lot of changes since the last alpha, several of them stability 
fixes. New plan: We release alpha-9 ASAP (that is to say, later today), and 
then work on the Yahoo module, making that the criterion for alpha-10. Once 
that's done, we start work on smileys, file transfer, etc.

How does that sound? Please comment...

Meredydd