We just added Google Talk to our Mobile Internet version. Our new Web Messenger already supported it, and now you can also chat with your Google Talk buddies on the road!
To check it out, just open the browser on your phone and go to:
m.ebuddy.com
We haven’t forgotten our PSP and Nintendo DS users: Google Talk is also ready to use for you! Just point your PSP or DS to the same address.
It is a beta version, so please let us know what you think on feedback@ebuddy.com!
Saturday, February 9, 2008
One day with eBuddy
Ryan Joseph from the Dastardly Report spend a day using only the new eBuddy Web Messenger. We’re very happy to report he really liked it, favouring it over other web clients.
Here are some snippets from his review:
Ebuddy was actually my favorite of all three programs I tested. It was the only one that didn’t try to simulate the desktop environment and did its own thing. When you first go to the page, you can select one of 5 instant message systems, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, and MySpace Messenger. This was the only one of the three I tested that supported MySpace.
I honestly didn’t have any problems with ebuddy. It was very fast, very smooth, and easy to use. To sign into more than one account at a time, just click the wrench at the top, then accounts.”
Ebuddy is the only one of the three I tested that I can actually see myself using on a semi-regular basis when I’m away from my computer. I really liked it.
To read the full review, head on over to the Dastardly Report blog. Or just jump in and try to new eBuddy Web Messenger for yourself and see how you like it!
Here are some snippets from his review:
Ebuddy was actually my favorite of all three programs I tested. It was the only one that didn’t try to simulate the desktop environment and did its own thing. When you first go to the page, you can select one of 5 instant message systems, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, and MySpace Messenger. This was the only one of the three I tested that supported MySpace.
I honestly didn’t have any problems with ebuddy. It was very fast, very smooth, and easy to use. To sign into more than one account at a time, just click the wrench at the top, then accounts.”
Ebuddy is the only one of the three I tested that I can actually see myself using on a semi-regular basis when I’m away from my computer. I really liked it.
To read the full review, head on over to the Dastardly Report blog. Or just jump in and try to new eBuddy Web Messenger for yourself and see how you like it!
Performance
The development team behind the new eBuddy web messenger has been working for some time now to make this client our future flagship product. While we are working on this client we are usually focused on certain themes or sets of (new) features, like conferencing or the support of a new network. Since it’s a new client, features like this are usually quite visible for you, the end-user and you can follow the progress we are making if you log in regularly. However, this doesn’t mean we spend all our time on the creation and development of these new features. Recently we’ve been focused on improving the performance of our client.
Performance has always been an important theme in software development and in every project it means something different. In our case we decided we wanted to dive into three different areas: the contacts tree, the chat tabs and the chat editor. For each of these areas we wanted to greatly improve the responsiveness so users spend less time waiting and more time chatting.
In this blog post I’ll dive a little deeper in what our approach was for each of the problems to give you a little insight in the work behind what we feel is the best chat client on the web. Please let us know how you feel about our efforts.
Editor
Arguably, the most important area was the chat editor where you can type the messages you send. Since chatting is what this application is all about we felt users should experience as little delay as possible while doing it. Before we started working on the performance of this component we identified two main problems. Firstly, while typing a new message, users could experience delays where the letters were lagging behind, appearing seconds later than they were typed. Secondly, when the new message is ready and the user pressed enter or clicked the send button, it sometimes took more than a second to appear in the message area above the chat.
The solution to the second problem was fairly easy. It was basically just a matter of showing the new message before anything else is done. The first was a harder nut to crack. While a user is typing a new message there’s a constant flow of update messages coming in about, for instance, the status of contacts. These messages are taking up a little time each to be processed in the background which is what causes the delay. In the end we decided to postpone the processing of these messages until the user is finished typing.
Tree
Optimizing the contacts tree came with its own set of challenges. It is certainly the most dynamic part of our chat application, constantly updating the status, display name and personal messages of the contacts. Here we identified the following problem: even though logging in with an average account (about 150 contacts) didn’t take very long, it still took a significant amount of time before we were ready with building the contacts tree and we could show it. This caused a problem with the perception of the performance: users thought logging in took a very long time when in fact it didn’t. We needed to find a way to show the tree sooner.
This was perhaps the hardest to optimize and I have to take off my hat to my fellow-developer Mike for that. Not only did he manage to really speed up the rendering of the tree, he managed to implement new sorting options as well. The tree can now be sorted in three different ways: by groups, by name and by account. For each of these options showing offline contacts is optional.
Tabs
We felt the chat tabs definitely needed some work as well. Once a user had several chats open, switching between them took a noticable time. Additionally, creating a new tab by starting a chat with someone sometimes took more than two seconds. Certainly a lot of room for improvement! To speed all this up we had a hybrid approach of doing things in a different order and optimizing the avatar pictures so we can show the tab contents sooner.
Tools
To be able to improve software performance you have to be able to measure it. Sometimes this means sitting next to your computer with a stopwatch, other times it means adding measurement points to the code and sometimes you rely on third-party tools like Firebug, which can accurately measure and profile code performance on the Firefox browser. It is very unfortunate that such a profiler doesn’t exist for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the most popular browser.
To bridge this gap Mike has developed a really interesting bit of JavaScript code that hooks into the client and profiles how often certain bits of code are used and how long that takes. For developers this is hugely interesting information and this tool is amazing enough to deserve its own blog post. Keep posted for this in the future.
Results
Without wanting to pat myself and my co-workers on the back too much, I really feel we’ve made a huge leap forwards in terms of performance and stability. The end result of this development phase is even better than I expected and we all really hope it translates into a better experience for our users. As always, please let us know how you feel about our products. We are continually working to improve them based our own experiences and, much more important, on user feedback.
Performance has always been an important theme in software development and in every project it means something different. In our case we decided we wanted to dive into three different areas: the contacts tree, the chat tabs and the chat editor. For each of these areas we wanted to greatly improve the responsiveness so users spend less time waiting and more time chatting.
In this blog post I’ll dive a little deeper in what our approach was for each of the problems to give you a little insight in the work behind what we feel is the best chat client on the web. Please let us know how you feel about our efforts.
Editor
Arguably, the most important area was the chat editor where you can type the messages you send. Since chatting is what this application is all about we felt users should experience as little delay as possible while doing it. Before we started working on the performance of this component we identified two main problems. Firstly, while typing a new message, users could experience delays where the letters were lagging behind, appearing seconds later than they were typed. Secondly, when the new message is ready and the user pressed enter or clicked the send button, it sometimes took more than a second to appear in the message area above the chat.
The solution to the second problem was fairly easy. It was basically just a matter of showing the new message before anything else is done. The first was a harder nut to crack. While a user is typing a new message there’s a constant flow of update messages coming in about, for instance, the status of contacts. These messages are taking up a little time each to be processed in the background which is what causes the delay. In the end we decided to postpone the processing of these messages until the user is finished typing.
Tree
Optimizing the contacts tree came with its own set of challenges. It is certainly the most dynamic part of our chat application, constantly updating the status, display name and personal messages of the contacts. Here we identified the following problem: even though logging in with an average account (about 150 contacts) didn’t take very long, it still took a significant amount of time before we were ready with building the contacts tree and we could show it. This caused a problem with the perception of the performance: users thought logging in took a very long time when in fact it didn’t. We needed to find a way to show the tree sooner.
This was perhaps the hardest to optimize and I have to take off my hat to my fellow-developer Mike for that. Not only did he manage to really speed up the rendering of the tree, he managed to implement new sorting options as well. The tree can now be sorted in three different ways: by groups, by name and by account. For each of these options showing offline contacts is optional.
Tabs
We felt the chat tabs definitely needed some work as well. Once a user had several chats open, switching between them took a noticable time. Additionally, creating a new tab by starting a chat with someone sometimes took more than two seconds. Certainly a lot of room for improvement! To speed all this up we had a hybrid approach of doing things in a different order and optimizing the avatar pictures so we can show the tab contents sooner.
Tools
To be able to improve software performance you have to be able to measure it. Sometimes this means sitting next to your computer with a stopwatch, other times it means adding measurement points to the code and sometimes you rely on third-party tools like Firebug, which can accurately measure and profile code performance on the Firefox browser. It is very unfortunate that such a profiler doesn’t exist for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the most popular browser.
To bridge this gap Mike has developed a really interesting bit of JavaScript code that hooks into the client and profiles how often certain bits of code are used and how long that takes. For developers this is hugely interesting information and this tool is amazing enough to deserve its own blog post. Keep posted for this in the future.
Results
Without wanting to pat myself and my co-workers on the back too much, I really feel we’ve made a huge leap forwards in terms of performance and stability. The end result of this development phase is even better than I expected and we all really hope it translates into a better experience for our users. As always, please let us know how you feel about our products. We are continually working to improve them based our own experiences and, much more important, on user feedback.
IM starts strike
Last friday, Dutch students rallied against a new law enforcing a minimum of 1040 hours of study each year.
Interestingly enough, they used Instant Messaging to start the rally. The call to strike spread over the internet like wildfire, winning out over media such as mobile phones and email.
Interestingly enough, they used Instant Messaging to start the rally. The call to strike spread over the internet like wildfire, winning out over media such as mobile phones and email.
eBuddy 7th Fastest Rising Search term on Google
We just found out that on the Google Zeitgeist 2007 “ebuddy” is the 7th fastest rising search term Globally! Great news, we are very VERY happy.
Yahoo network issues
Early this morning we noticed some problems with our Yahoo connection which caused erroneous “Wrong username/password” messages.
After a couple of minutes of studying the logs and stepping through the sourcecode we found the issue and it was quickly resolved.
Servers are being upgraded as we speak, so Yahoo service should be restored fully in a short while.
After a couple of minutes of studying the logs and stepping through the sourcecode we found the issue and it was quickly resolved.
Servers are being upgraded as we speak, so Yahoo service should be restored fully in a short while.
Thanks a Million, Dank je wel, Merci beaucoup, Muchos Gracias, Obrigado, Kiitos, Köszönöm, Grazie, Tack, cảm ơn,
Thanks to all of you who have helped translating eBuddy in your own language the last couple of weeks! As of today, eBuddy is 100% fully translated in the following languages:
Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Swedish and Vietnamese.
And therefore I would like to give some special thanks a couple of translators who truly worked completely voluntary all day and night to complete their translations before the new release this week!
Blue-Cyber
Chinese and Japanese
B40166873 Horizon
Chinese
Gerasimos Kontos
Greek
Markos Chattari
Greek
Tejes
Hungarian
Mervi
Finnish
Pierre Cauchy
French
Marianna Medea
Italian
Andrea.admin
Italian
Eleonora Spizzamiglio
Italian
Lasse Jensen
Danish
Lone Dahlberg
Swedish
Fanny Forslind
Swedish
Also, Blue-Cyber made a very cool eBuddy Translator display picture and inspired our own designer Allan who created 6 cool eBuddy Translator Avatars for you as a small X-Mas gift …
Here’s one example, the others can be downloaded via the translation Wiki
To all of you who want to help us update and/or translate eBuddy in your own language, send me an email at translation@ebuddy.com with your name and language you wish to translate!
Merry X-Mas to you all!
Marc and Niels
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