Fire (instant messaging client)

Infobox Software
name = Fire



caption = Chat window on Fire
developer = Fire developers
author = Eric Peyton, Colter Reed
released = 1999-04-01
frequently_updated = yes
programming language = ?
operating system = Mac OS X
language = ?
genre = Instant messaging client
license = GPL
status = Unmaintained
website = http://fire.sourceforge.net

Fire is the first instant messaging client for Mac OS X (previously for OPENSTEP), that can access IRC, Jabber, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and Bonjour. All services are built on GPL’d libraries, including firetalk, libfaim, libicq2000, libmsn, Jabber, and libyahoo2.

The latest version of Fire (as of 2006-02-15) is 1.5.6. The program is released under the GNU General Public License.

On 2007-02-23 it was announced that there would be no future versions of Fire released. The official Fire website stated there were several reasons, the biggest being the loss of developers, followed by the fact that most components libraries used by Fire are no longer in active development. Two of Fire's developers have joined the Adium team and have written a transition path for users to move from Fire to Adium. The announcement also says to look to Adium for future IM needs.

History

In the early beta days of Mac OS X, Eric Peyton wanted to have an IM client which would run on this new OS. However, all of the official client vendors had not yet supported Mac OS X, so Peyton started expanding on an OPENSTEP project he had been working on, which used an open source library to connect with AIM servers. He started porting this using the new Cocoa libraries on OS X and a new IM client began to take shape.

Development in the early days was fast and furious and Fire was touted by Apple as one of the keystone applications on Mac OS X v10.0. Initially Peyton hosted the application and did all the development on his own equipment. He then formed the corporation [http://www.epicware.com "Epicware"] to protect himself from the lawyers of the huge corporations he was interacting with.

The application was expanded to include the ability to talk to multiple servers. First Yahoo! Messenger and ICQ were added, followed later by IRC, MSN, and Jabber. Most recently, support for Bonjour was added.

In 2001, Colter Reed started contributing to the development of Fire on a regular basis and became the second major developer of Fire. They collaborated for a while using the Epicware hardware and finally decided to move the project to SourceForge to take advantage of the free hosting, download, and mirror services available there. Version 0.28.a was the first release which used the SourceForge System.

On 2007-02-23 development of Fire officially ended due to lack of developers.

See also

*List of Jabber client software
*Comparison of instant messaging clients

External links

* [http://fire.sourceforge.net Official Website]
* [http://fire.sourceforge.net/forums Fire's Public Forums]
* [http://www.macworld.com/2005/04/reviews/imsoftware/index.php MacWorld review]