[Cs22800] Fire project proposal/goals

[Ken Tsang]

Eric Lee
Ken Tsang
CS22800 Spring 2003
Free Software Practicum

FIRE

What is Fire?
-------------
Fire is a multi-protocol (AOL Instant Messenger/ICQ/Internet Relay
Chat/Jabber/MSN Messenger/Yahoo! Messenger) instant messaging client for
Mac OS X.

What is our involvement?
------------------------
Our intention originally was to provide significant (and well-needed) 
user
interface improvements to be incorporated into the 1.0 release of Fire,
currently scheduled for the end of May. The ultimate goal for Fire is to
replace completely a user's reliance on any official, protocol-specific
instant messaging clients. The modest goal for 1.0 is to polish up what
work has currently been done on this project (which dates back to 1999) 
so
that it merits the bump from 0.32.d to 1.0.

What have we done?
------------------
Our contributions to the project thus far have merited our being granted
full Developer status.  So far, this work has included minor projects,
such as porting the "smileys" from the Windows ICQ client and editing 
the
buddy info windows so they are resizable. Ken has also provided a 
complete
localization for both Simplified and Traditional Chinese systems for the
current 0.32 branch, and will be bringing Chinese to 1.0 when the
localization freeze takes place sometime in May.

What is to come?
----------------
While we might have been satisfied with minor, yet crucial, cleanup 
tasks
that would ensure a professional-level release, we have taken on the
larger task of reforming the Preferences user interface, which can
currently be considered "a bit confusing." The task at hand is not minor
and will take some serious planning and several rounds of approval.

Planned Timeline
----------------
05/31/2003 - Commit redone Preferences
05/24/2003 - Make changes, resubmit for approval
05/17/2003 - Make changes, resubmit for approval
05/10/2003 - Submit initial list of changes for approval by other devs
05/03/2003 - Finish making list of all current and requested preferences

URLs
----
http://fire.sourceforge.net
mailto:ericlee1 at midway.uchicago.edu
mailto:kftsang at cs.uchicago.edu