Sometimes, the best projects come out of the dumbest disputes.

I was in my room, and my former roommate Clockfort and Russ got talking about old chat protocols that we used to use. Clockfort suddenly remembered his old ICQ number, and we went around adding each other on all of our old chat networks.

I took this joke a little far, however. I started making all kinds of new accounts. I went through every protocol supported by pidgin, and signed up for accounts. At the time, pidgin listed QQ as a supported protocol.

I signed up for a QQ account, and tried to connect with pidgin. Unfortunately, it just didn't work. I found out that the builtin QQ plugin didn't support the latest QQ protocol. I fount a plugin called libqq-pidgin that did exactly what I needed. So I installed it, and added my one Chinese friend to my buddy list.

Later that night, I wanted to talk to her at work. I booted up Adium, and added my QQ account. Unfortunately, it didn't work, because like pidgin, Adium is built on top of libpurple, and libpurple dropped official support for QQ. My solution was to write my own QQ plugin for Adium.

The end result is AdiumQQ. It supports basic features right now, like chat and such. It does not support file transfers or captchas just yet. Those features are coming.

Today, I'm posting about it in my blog because it just got accepted in Adium Xtras. I'm really proud, since this is my first open source program I've written that people are finding useful.

Thanks to the libqq-pidgin team for making a nice base for me to build my plugin off of!

I will of course announce any new release information on my blog.