So it has been a while since BlackFire has received an update and its finally here.
Basically it adds the following features:
- Extended chat room support
- A new games manager
- Better UI
- Improved logging in
- Tons and tons of bug fixes
- Improved link detection
- Spelling checking
The chat room support had to be done and I decided to do it this version. It has been here for quite some time but I always left it unfinished. Now it is fully featured, including features as
permissions and chat room access control.
The games manager is meant to solve the problem of certain games not being detected. I am only
1 man and cannot add all the mac games out there. This games manager should give you guys
the access you. It will also show whether it can detect the game or not, do not be alarmed if it
does not show you game as detected, it might be an error in determining whether its actually detected, still it will be quite precise in 99% of the cases.
As BlackFire is the first application I have ever written I usually add stuff when I learn how to do it.
Just after I finished the previous update I started playing with custom UI controls.
I took this a little bit further and I have made some improvements to the look and feel of BlackFire, as you can see in the screenshot above.
I also tried to include a tabbed chat window, I failed in this though. It is a lot of work to get it working correctly, I will work on it some more in the future though I do not know whether I will ever finish it. It is supposed to look like Safari's one.
BlackFire used to connect directly, meaning it would wait till the connection was made. That is done asynchronously now meaning it will simply wait till it gets a notification that the connection has been made (15 seconds timeout, after which it will give "An error occurred" error). This is an attempt to stop a potential freeze
which can happen when you have some exotic internet situations. As far as I know this should stop that.
Hope you guys like it and let me know if you have any other ideas or suggestions. post Author jabwd | written on 2010-08-31 18:18:11 |
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Xfireuserlol Great Version, I like the new feel of Blackfire. A few suggestions are Moving Groups would be nice. The Name Suggestion i made in a previous post. The Chat Room tab would be nice. The Avatars on the sidebar isnt always up to date that would be a good fix.
Plugin capabilities?
Ok so I have been reading Adium's source code a little and I found a few interesting things.
One of these things is the plugin system > I already thought of this a few weeks back and it seems
that adium uses the same approach: override the methods that have to behave differently using
objective-c method swizzling!
BlackFire already has a small APi for that, so I only have to create some documentation, a plugin loader and a framework or header files (= definitions of blackfire's internals) to give developers
or some other people access to change BlackFire's behavior.
Now is my question, would you guys want something like this? There are virtually no limits to what
can be changed inside blackfire, the only downside is that a badly written plugin can cause blackfire to crash / break stuff.
post Author jabwd | written on 2010-08-29 18:52:11 |
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EmperiorEric Well I mean if its a bad plugin then you uninstall it no problem. I like the idea. It would be cool cause you could use it in another app later down the road.
S2 Ports NEVER! DON'T DO IT!
You can now start commenting..
I have been working on this for a while and finally finished it, a commenting system for macxfire.com which allows you guys to comment on a news post.
Also, BlackFire 1.3.4 will be relased soon, I finished the planned features but added some stuff I want to do before releasing it to the public, contact me at xfire if you want to know more. post Author jabwd | written on 2010-08-28 12:00:06 |
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jabwd Just testing the new commenting system ^^
PuF same :/
EmperiorEric Very cool I have really been wanting to comment on some of the news posts!
Great Version, I like the new feel of Blackfire. A few suggestions are Moving Groups would be nice. The Name Suggestion i made in a previous post. The Chat Room tab would be nice. The Avatars on the sidebar isnt always up to date that would be a good fix.