Shoutbox

Hey!

I was a very happy Messenger Plus user for many years. Whenever I sat down at a machine without Messenger Plus, I found it too awkward to use. Anyway, I've a reasonably old machine, so much so that newer msns consume too many cycles somehow to actually be doing anything useful while chatting and surfing. After a while I switched to Unix and gaim, which runs a lot faster, perhaps because of the better swap system.

Gaim has a lot of nifty msg+ like features, but it's not quite the same. I'd like to have more msg+y features, but without reverse engineering or packet sniffing, neither of which I have experience with, I don't know how to go about building that integration in. Does anyone know if there's anything published concerning the format of the msg+ text formating and such? Or anything else published concerning msg+ for that matter?

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Originally posted by Verte
Gaim has a lot of nifty msg+ like features, but it's not quite the same. I'd like to have more msg+y features, but without reverse engineering or packet sniffing, neither of which I have experience with, I don't know how to go about building that integration in. Does anyone know if there's anything published concerning the format of the msg+ text formating and such?

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I don't see what there is to reverse engineer or otherwise learn from Plus! for your stated purpose.  There might be something to learn from how Plus! interfaces to Messenger if you were looking to create another add-on for Messenger/Windows, but to extend an open source IM client with similar features, you should just take the current Gaim source code as your starting point, familiarize yourself with it, and add the features you want. 

Under GPL, you can always distribute your extended version independently (as long as you provide the source code).  You can also look into offering your extensions as a source code patch (which users can apply to the current Gaim source tree before they build it), or see if the developer(s) of Gaim will simply accept your work for inclusion in the next release.

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Originally posted by Adeptus

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Originally posted by Verte
Gaim has a lot of nifty msg+ like features, but it's not quite the same. I'd like to have more msg+y features, but without reverse engineering or packet sniffing, neither of which I have experience with, I don't know how to go about building that integration in. Does anyone know if there's anything published concerning the format of the msg+ text formating and such?

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I don't see what there is to reverse engineer or otherwise learn from Plus! for your stated purpose.  There might be something to learn from how Plus! interfaces to Messenger if you were looking to create another add-on for Messenger/Windows, but to extend an open source IM client with similar features, you should just take the current Gaim source code as your starting point, familiarize yourself with it, and add the features you want. 

Under GPL, you can always distribute your extended version independently (as long as you provide the source code).  You can also look into offering your extensions as a source code patch (which users can apply to the current Gaim source tree before they build it), or see if the developer(s) of Gaim will simply accept your work for inclusion in the next release.

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It's not how Plus! interfaces to messenger that's the thing- more how Plus! extends the messenger API. For example, what actually gets sent when trying to execute a change of font colour or /me.

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Originally posted by Verte

It's not how Plus! interfaces to messenger that's the thing- more how Plus! extends the messenger API. For example, what actually gets sent when trying to execute a change of font colour or /me.

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You might want to take a look at Pai's Xniff to find out what gets sent and how. Note that you'll probably need a windows (virtual) machine to use it.

ty

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Originally posted by Jesus

You might want to take a look at Pai's Xniff to find out what gets sent and how. Note that you'll probably need a windows (virtual) machine to use it.

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you mean an emulator?

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Originally posted by ICD

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Originally posted by Jesus

You might want to take a look at Pai's Xniff to find out what gets sent and how. Note that you'll probably need a windows (virtual) machine to use it.

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you mean an emulator?

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Not really, a VM will work just fine.

you don't need any VM at all... Just run Xniff, configure it properly and you'll see anything you need.

In fact, you don't need Xniff either.

Messenger Plus!'s features have for 99,99% nothing to do with the protocol or sending/recieving stuff. Only the colors, and a few other things like /me, /ping and custom sounds use have something todo with sending stuff, all the rest is pure and only Messenger hooking and manipulating of windows.

And the special charactes used and reconized by Plus! for colors and such things is also already well explained in many posts around the forums though...

In fact, if you simply use Messenger's own logging you can see everything you need to see as far as those special formatting characters goes, custom sounds, etc, etc, etc.

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
you don't need any VM at all... Just run Xniff, configure it properly and you'll see anything you need.

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I was mentioning it because Verte said he is using Unix... I don't think Xniff works on Unix

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Originally posted by Jesus

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
you don't need any VM at all... Just run Xniff, configure it properly and you'll see anything you need.

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I was mentioning it because Verte said he is using Unix... I don't think Xniff works on Unix

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Correct- it requires a running MS TCP/IP stack if I'm not mistaken, therefore win32 API [such as wine] is not enough, you need a full Windows instance running.

Thanks heaps though Cookie- that's nice and easy.