HI boys and girls.

As some of you may know, I much prefer the internal Nokia provided chat program over running secondary programs like Pidgin. Specifically, the integration of presence everywhere, including the Contacts app.

So, a while ago we saw Pidgin users get access to Facebook chat through the pidgin-facebookchat plugin (which can be found at http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/) and I wanted the same thing. I started working on this about two days ago and I wanted to show you all my current progress.


Contact app showing just people on the Facebook protocol.


Accounts dialog box


Presence system tray menu


Chatting through the Facebook protocol with my wife (ignore the timestamps, that's my fault)

At this point, I wouldn't consider this to be ready for release yet. The reason for this is because, as you can see in the above images, the Contacts app isn't actually showing if friends are online or not. Something about how I implemented this appears to have broken MSN in the same way.. still works, but status isn't shown.

When a chat starts, you'll get the standard incoming chat notification. It shows the Facebook profile number for the person instead of their name. This also happens at the start of the chat until about 30 seconds later, which you can also see in the pictures above.

Facebook notifications are supported by the plugin and are received by the tablet as shown by the syslog, however they aren't handled at this time. I'd imagine we could handle the notification the same way as a new incoming e-mail notification.

I would like to release this plugin as soon as the status issue for MSN and Facebook is fixed with the notifications being a secondary priority. I've reached out to Collabora, the guys behind RTCOMM, to see if they have advice or time to help me with these issues. I would appreciate any help from anyone that has knowledge of RTCOMM, telepathy and telepathy-haze so that we can polish this up and get it usable for one and all.