Re: MSN Avatars

On Nov 23, 2004, at 12:24 PM, Alexei Svitkine wrote:

>> We don't currently support MSN buddy icons, however we have all the  
>> support infrastructure there to add that feature since we support  
>> buddy icons on AIM.
>>
>> There's a feature request for this here:
>>
>> [ 832575 ] MSN: Buddy Picture
>> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? 
>> func=detail&aid=832575&group_id=33772&atid=409173
>>
>> From Mark's last comment in the feature request:
>>
>> Any help that can be offered for this would be most appreciated --  
>> MSN display pictures are dealt with via a different protocol from
>> the standard MSN things.  This would be a lot of work to implement.   
>> On the plus side, custom emoticons and file transfers behind NAT  
>> would be more or less "free" once this is implemented.
>>
>> This is something that I plan to look into in the future.
>>
>> -Jason
>>
>
> One IM client that's also GPL'd that implements this is Miranda IM -  
> http://www.miranda-im.org/. Might be worthwhile to look at their  
> source. IMO this a pretty big feature that Fire lacks.

 From my point of view MSN Avatars are relatively unimportant compared  
to some of the other issues that need to be resolved.  The biggest  
issue is complete file transfer support, followed by all round  
stability.  Put simply, it's not something that I personally care  
about, other than from a "it would be nice to support the same features  
as other clients" point of view.

I initially started looking into supporting avatars and the related  
features (custom emoticons, file transfers when both parties are behind  
NAT, etc) several months ago.  My conclusion was that the way the MSN  
library Fire uses is structured will make it difficult to add support  
for these features.  I have put in a lot of work since then on  
refactoring the code to make adding support easier, but due to lack of  
time I've not started working on these features directly.

While other GPL'd clients have support for MSN avatars, they share no  
MSN-related code with Fire and are typically structured in quite  
different manners.  This means their code isn't easily portable or very  
useful as a reference.

What's it going to take to get this feature implemented?  Either  
someone who knows C++ and Objective-C who is willing to step up and  
submit patches, copious amounts of spare time on my behalf, or  
something miraculous to happen that convinces me to add it <wink>.  I  
am more than willing to help out anyone who is interested in working on  
this feature.

I hope this clarifies things a little bit more.

Regards,

Mark Rowe
<http://bdash.net.nz/>