Freerunner Chat Application: Suggestions wanted!

[Michael Sheldon]

Alex Teiche wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I recently recieved my A6 FreeRunner, and have been looking for some coding
> to do:)  I plan on writing a chat application(similar to Pidgin) optomized
> for the small screen.  I was wondering what suggestions the community had
> before I get too far into it.

Hi Alex,

 I'm actually currently working on a project similar to this using
elementary and telepathy; I haven't made it particularly public yet as
it's only in a very roughly usable state and I think I still need to
spend some time updating some of the telepathy packages in OE before
it's easy to install directly on the device (there are easy to install
debian/ubuntu packages though).

 At present it supports Jabber for text and jingle (google talk) for
VoIP; although it's reasonably trivial to make other protocols
available. If you'd like to join the effort you're more than welcome, I
won't take offense if you decide you want to go your own way though ;)

 The final plan is to make it a complete communications package that
handles SMS and GSM conversations as well as IM and VoIP (by writing
some telepathy connection managers that talk to FSO); we have the
skeleton of an SMS connection manager at the moment, but it hasn't been
a high priority yet so it's pretty unfinished. It would then support a
kind of "meta-contact" which would store details about a contact across
multiple protocols so the best option could be chosen depending on
availability (e.g. if wifi is available and the contact is online, then
use VoIP, otherwise make a normal GSM call). That's all a little way in
the future though.

 You can find more details and a few slightly out-of-date screenshots at
http://www.openapathy.org and you can find myself (Elleo) and the other
main developer (alasdair) in #apathy on irc.freenode.net if you want to
chat a bit more.

 Cheers,
  Mike.