It's a bit late...

It's a bit late for me to be posting this now, but we did recently release Pidgin 2.5.0. There are a few things about this release that I'd like to discuss:

• MSNP15 support
• Custom smiley support
• The Windows and *BSD AIM tooltip crash

Let's hit these in the order I listed them.

MSNP15. Finally, we have a release which includes updated MSN protocol support. We now support the personal message, current media, and offline message features of recent MSN official clients. We do not, however, support fast file transfers. We still support only the MSN-server-proxied transfer method, which while slow is 100% reliable. Quite frankly, file transfer isn't a high priority. If someone wants to implement fast file transfers, feel free to submit patches to us.

Custom smileys. During the development cycle of 2.5.0, a patch was accepted that implemented custom smiley support on MSN and provided a framework within libpurple for other protocols supporting the feature to grow support. There is one issue with this support--we can't save an incoming animated GIF emoticon. This is a limitation in gdkpixbuf, which doesn't support saving the GIF format by default. There are perhaps some additional dependencies we could incur for this, but nothing has been done in this area yet. To set up your custom smileys, go to the "Tools" menu on the Buddy List window and select "Smiley."

AIM Tooltip Crash. We've had a number of duplicated reports of crashes when "mousing over" an AIM buddy. The crash happens when trying to display the tooltip, and only appears when Glib uses its internal vsnprintf() implementation (which happens on some non-glibc systems, such as Windows and the BSD flavors of UNIX). An updated liboscar.dll that fixes this problem is available on ticket #6627. Please don't open any more tickets about this bug!

There is one other AIM bug I'd like to mention, since we're aware it exists. Not too long ago it came to our attention that when a Pidgin user joins an AIM chatroom and tries to send messages, less than 25% of the messages actually make it to the other members of the room. We are aware of the bug, but I believe we're not yet fully certain of the cause. A bug report already exists (#6590), so please don't open any more tickets about this bug either!

Hopefully all you MSN users out there enjoy the new features. It's taken a long time to get the features out there, but I think in the end the wait is worth it.