If you wondered what's happening, the beta release is very close. I plan to release smuxi beta (0.6) this month. Smuxi made good steps forward regarding stability and API design. I've been using smuxi as my primary IRC client almost a year already and it's fun.

Also the GNOME frontend is not the only one anymore I made proof-of-concept frontends using different UI toolkits like Curses / STFL and WinForms (native Windows). The WinForms frontend was started and is maintained by Zhila. The proof-of-concept frontends will be a very good base for other developers wanting to contribute to the smuxi project. The different frontends was needed to find possible API design flaws, and I found some but those were minor issues.

That's not all yet I need to blog! The IRC protocol implementation was always made in modular fashion. It is only an implementation of a protocol manager interface. But I never managed to implement a different protocol (no time, no real interest) but some months ago I got hot trying the XMPP / Jabber protocol, as many of my friends are using different protocols (like ICQ, AIM, MSN). Jabber supports gateways to other protocols, so I thought with Jabber I could kill all protocol holes with one stone. And that was a big success, smuxi has now experimental Jabber support too, supporting person and group chats (no presence / contacts though). Too much text already? Then check this screenshot. On that screenshot you can see me connected to a Jabber server, chatting to iamthejaymann through the Jabber server over the AIM gateway I think that's enough news for now, it's getting hot in here

Stay tuned, it's worth it!