v 0.6.0 - 9 June 2000
v 0.8.0 - 12 Dec 2000
v 1.9.3 - 23 Jan 2004
I started helping the Jabber project sometime in late 1998. Initially I worked on fixing up the XML protocol and making sure Jabber's understanding of XML Namespaces was correct. I felt I could create a better client interface than those that currently existed, so I mocked one up using Glade. Dave Smith convinced me to help him put together a client using those mockups.
Gabber 1 was one of the earliest major Linux/Gnome applications to be written in C++ using gtkmm and libglade. I cut my teeth on C++ with Dave's help and learned a lot about OO programming (he was a good teacher). Eventually he moved on to other projects and I became the lead programmer and project maintainer.
Gabber 2 was an attempt to rewrite Gabber for Gnome 2 / Gtkmm 2. Unfortunately I stopped maintaining Gabber. There were typical Open Source issues with library maintainers, there are many other instant messaging clients available for Linux/Gnome these days, and I am primarily a Mac OS X (and iChat) user now. I asked for a replacement maintainer, but no one stepped up.
Regardless, Gabber has been extremely important to my life—I've been benefitting from the skills I learned ever since.
In 2000 I was featured in an article in The Wall Street Journal about my visit to a conference as a 16-year-old.
Later that year I was interviewed by LinuxOrbit (Google cache copy).
The next year Salon.com talked about Gabber in the introduction to an article about Sourceforge.
A KDE user reviewed a competing instant messaging client and decided he would stick with Gabber.
In 2002 I was interviewed by Jabber.org as a featured developer.
Freshmeat.net had an Instant Messaging Clients overview in 2002: "Still, Gabber is a young program and shows promise, especially with its very attractive user interface." (Most of the problems they had were due to changing specifications in Gnome and KDE, which were finally settled by the time I worked on Gabber 2)
The only major piece of literature I've written about Gabber specifically has been iChat and Gabber: Interfaces Investigated [pdf]. I wrote this paper attempting to "bridge the gap" between academia and the real world by comparing iChat and Gabber's interfaces with some of the Computer-Mediated Communication research problems.
I discovered that many of the problems iChat and Gabber are attempting to solve were at least discovered by Computer-Mediated Communication several years ahead of time—but the solutions offered by the industry are different from those researched by academia.
I have also written several pieces about iChat, intending to explain features of its design which I felt other instant messaging client developers were ignoring. The oldest one was iChat Thought Bubbles. My intent was to review some of the good features of iChat so other developers would think about its interface features more critically. I was worried that too many developers were being put off by the speech bubbles. Fortunately my worries turned out to be unwarranted.
