It's time to revive BeAIM - Retro messaging in 2024

Nice. It was all about MSN when I was a kid. AIM seems cool though.

I made an account on ChivaNet, but no one is talking to me :sob:

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I also host an msn service for early clients

I fear we don’t have a Haiku-native client for that,however.

I registered via Phenixim first but I couldn’t log in with BeAIM. The left panel on your website says AIM services are offline, so it must have something to do with it.

BeAIM crashed when I tried to remove a group from the Buddylist

Buddylist management is something I’ll have to review/rework soon,probably the next item on my list after finishing the transition to Layout Kit.
I think it crashes if the group you’re trying to remove still contains buddys?
If it’s empty,you can remove it,but it appears again after restarting the application,so something is really not correct here.

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Yes, it crashed while the group still had buddys.

Didn’t Caya support MSN at one point?

There was an old, open source MSN client for BeOS, BeMSN.

I can’t find much information about that one,but searching for it has lead me to GitHub - HaikuArchives/Bme: The most feature complete MSN messenger program for BeOS and derivatives. which is another native MSN client,right there in HaikuArchives.
I wonder how I could have missed that until today.
And yes,Caya also supported MSN.

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As far as I remember that’s actually BeMSN renamed - I forgot that had happened. I think around the time of Gaim becoming Pidgin and there being concerns about using service names in unofficial clients.

Credits mention ā€œoriginal BeMSNā€ so it might be a continuation rather than a rename, but its the same codebase

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From the Wayback Machine…

https://web.archive.org/web/20010218213449/http://www.bebits.com/browse/34

I’ve just finished and released BeAIM 1.7.0 where I’ve rewritten the whole UI to make use of Haikus great Layout Kit.
Instead of hardcoded coordinates,UI elements are now positioned dynamically,which reduces glitches and lays the groundwork for HiDPI support.
On top of that,yes,I have also completed the HiDPI support for this release by calculating all sizes based on the font size - the only hardcoded size you should still find by now is 0,because 2*0 stays 0.
I have replaced the custom MakSplitterView in the ChatWindow with a standard BSplitView,that,I think,hasn’t existed back when BeAIM was initially written.
In the LoginBox,I replaced the username dropdown solution with the PopupTextControl widget by @PulkoMandy from his XMPP client Renga.
That integrates better with the Layout Kit and looks,well,less broken.

HPKGs for both x86 and x86_64 are available again at the Codeberg releases page.

If you prefer to build your own packages from source instead,you can clone the Git repository and simply run make package to produce a hpkg file that you can then install.
Happy Easter :rabbit:

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