Spark 2.5 Beta Released

We are pleased to announce the first beta release of Spark 2.5 along with the initial beta release of the phone plugin. The quality of the Spark beta release is as, if not more stable than previous Spark releases. We have gone through many iterations with the phone plugin, and are quite happy with how things have turned out, but realize we still have some work to do in order for it be rock solid. Please enjoy and provide any feedback you do have in this forum.

Feature Highlights

New Look and Feel

Enhanced Emoticon Support

Better Memory Management

Increased Performance

Buzz Feature (haha, yes we added it)

Last But Not Least

Some great bug fixes from all the great feedback we have been getting from the community. Everything from transcript issues to show/hide main window. Also, we have the fix for the bookmarks and disappearing users in conference rooms.

You can download Spark 2.5 beta from the following links:

(REMOVED)

Phone Plugin (Windows Only) - requires Wildfire Enterprise

The phone plugin relies on the latest release of Wildfire Enterprise.

Phone plugin for Spark - sparkphone.jar

Spark SoftPhone

Wildfire Enterprise

(REMOVED)

Enjoy,

Spark Team

Message was edited by matt – removed links, as a new beta is about to go up.

Great job! I can’'t wait to try it out

ddman wrote:

Buzz Feature (haha, yes we added it)

What IS the “buzz feature”, and what does it do?

Thanks for a great product,

/John

how much memory does it approx. consume?

2.4.1 uses 50mb of ram for me… quite a lot unfortunately, but, still a great program!

Edit: sorry, i get it now… 2.4.1 IS the 2.5 beta… ahh…

buzz function is nice =)

anyway it doesn’‘t always work… PersonX can buzz me but i can’'t buzz personX… both have 2.4.1

And i see the history UTF-8 gibberish bug is fixed, nice!

Message was edited by: IT-Patrik

it makes the messages window shake like crazy… might make a sound, don’'t know cause i have no speakers right now.

Sorry if I ask dumb questions, but I’'m not an expert concerning Wildfire/Spark …

I recently get interested in them, when both became opensource (or to be precise Spark)

So here some questions:

  1. the phone functionality requires a wildfire plugin, does that mean that it isn’'t plain direct connection between clients ?

That would mean only two spark users on wildfire servers could use the phone function ?

No clients interoperability, no servers interoperability ?

  1. the wildfire plugin requires “Wildfire Server” (I suppose it’‘s Wilfire Enterprise). Is it a definite requirements ? or it’'s just for the beta.

  2. Just a detail, I saw on the main toolbar of Spark two icons, for “AIM” and for “Yahoo” connection. Is it direct connection to yahoo/aim network ? or normal through “transport”

Does spark becoming a multi-protocol IM like gaim, miranda, … what library does it use to connect to this proprietary network ? what compatibilty is provided ?

Thanks and regards.

Hello again Spark developers:

Thanks for the release, so far I’'ve noticed several small bugs which were bothering us in 2.0.8 are now gone!

I will leave some quick feedback concerning the new blue glossy UI: I really enjoyed the clean, grey and blue minimalist look that previous versions have employed. It seems that the titlebar and menus are now more of a “Vista” (or KDE) type gloss appearance while the lower half of the panel has retained the older soft appearance - sort of a clash I feel.

Everything else looks absolutely wonderful and seems to be running smoothly!

-AJO

  1. the phone functionality requires a wildfire plugin, does that mean that it isn’'t plain direct connection between clients ?

That would mean only two spark users on wildfire servers could use the phone function ?

No clients interoperability, no servers interoperability ?

We’‘re working on two VoIP features. The one that Derek mentions above is SIP client support. That’‘s a commercial feature, and it’'s meant for integrating with existing VoIP systems (like Asterisk) to replace your hard phone.

We’‘re also working on Jingle support, which will be for PC to PC calling. That feature won’'t require any Wildfire plugins, and will be Open Source.

  1. Just a detail, I saw on the main toolbar of Spark two icons, for “AIM” and for “Yahoo” connection. Is

it direct connection to yahoo/aim network ? or normal through “transport”

It’'s a gateway connection using the Wildfire gateways plugin.

Regards,

Matt

I will leave some quick feedback concerning the new blue glossy UI: I really enjoyed the clean,

grey and blue minimalist look that previous versions have employed. It seems that the titlebar

and menus are now more of a “Vista” (or KDE) type gloss appearance while the lower half of the

panel has retained the older soft appearance - sort of a clash I feel.

Thanks for the feedback. I’'m actually a fan of the new look, but choice is a good thing. I filed this request as SPARK-496.

Regards,

Matt

Ok, nice !

I’'m now completely reassured

Just have to wait more for the jingle connectivity.

Concerning the gateway, according to this page I found: http://wiki.igniterealtime.org/display/WILDFIRE/IMGatewayPlugin

The buttons should be “wrapper” for the usual transports mecanism. Nevertheless when I tested Spark, I used a jabber account with msn and yahoo configured through their respective transport (dne under pandion). And when I run spark, it doesn’'t seems to know that yahoo is connected.

I can’‘t try again for now, Spark refuse to run under my linux box ("couldn’'t find per display info", seems to relate to icon tray and my java 6 install).

Thanks for all your great work.

PS: btw, could it be possible to package Spark for linux without JRE also ? People often have plenty of jre on their system.

I found a bug!

If there is no proxy setting setup in network environments where one is required, Spark fails to grab Emoticons from apple.com. This causes the lots of problems and makes the client unusable.

Workaround: Add a proxy server.

Jae

Grabbing emoticons from apple.com? What emoticons are you grabbing

Cheers,

Derek

Not me…spark did it on its own. All I know is that once the proxy was entered in, Spark started behaving correctly. Here is the complete Log:

Nov 14, 2006 8:05:18 AM org.jivesoftware.spark.util.log.Log error

SEVERE:

java.net.UnknownHostException: www.jivesoftware.org

at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(Unknown Source)

at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(Unknown Source)

at java.net.Socket.connect(Unknown Source)

at java.net.Socket.connect(Unknown Source)

at java.net.Socket.(ChatRoomImpl.java:104)

at org.jivesoftware.spark.ChatManager$1.finished(ChatManager.java:285)

at org.jivesoftware.spark.util.SwingWorker$2$1.run(SwingWorker.java:136)

at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(Unknown Source)

at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source)

at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(Unknown Source)

at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(Unknown Source)

at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(Unknown Source)

at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)

at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)

at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Unknown Source)

BTW: I think the new client rocks…can’'t wait for jingle support

Message was edited by: jaebird

So does Spark crash when that happens? I would hope it would fail more gracefully

SPARK-502

Thanks,

Derek

I hate to be a pest, but I -really- want to be able to use spark at my company…SPARK-314 “Apple-W to close a chat tab/window.” is still an issue even though it was marked as fixed. In fact with 2.0.8 ctrl-w was able to close the window as i noted in the ticket, but that is not the case now with 2.5 beta.

I SSOOOO want to get rid of iChat and have a solid jabber client for my all Mac office so i will continue holding the HIG torch for(under) Spark

Message was edited by: rparrish

Something is wrong with a GRIN emoticon. Not replacing it with image.

Chat windows are saving size and position. Could you please make MUC window to save frame sizes? I mean if i drag messages and muc roster divider to make roster thiner (not equal size with messages window as it does now) so it should remember that for any new room i open after closing that window.

Nesting. I have group “test” with group name as “one :: two” and a few contacts in there. So in Spark i see group “one” and a line “There are no online contacts in this group”. Though there are no contacts in group “one”. Well, there is no real group “one”, but it could be, and it could be empty, just for a hierarchy. So it’'s not nice to have such lines all the way through the roster.

One more thing. I have created group nest-main with group name nest-name (added some contacts). Then i created group nest-sub with group name nest-main :: nest-sub (some ocntacts).

So now i see:

nest-main

contacts

nest-main

There are no online contacts in this group

nest-sub

contacts

Not good. I want nest-sub to be a part of real nest-main, and not to create fake root groups. Exodus handles this better.

Why is Spark 2.08 seeing this release and asking if I want to upgrade? Going from 2.08 -> 2.41?

If this is beta, please don’‘t have the stable version see it and decide it needs to install it. I’'ve got 30 people now who will be installing beta software. What a nightmare!

Hi Rojs,

Do you have Enteprise installed? If so, you can specify which client they should be on and bypass any craziness with the updates directly from igniterealtime.org. However, yes, we need to improve our update functionallity to allow for alpha, betas and release candidates.

Cheers,

Derek

Hey Wroot,

So how do you see that working? If we multiple chat rooms open and the divider is in different locations, which dimensions should be saved?

Cheers,

Derek