Ayttm

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Ayttm
Image:Ayttm.png
Image:AyttmMain.png
Ayttm 0.2.1-1.1 main window/contacts list on Gnome
Developed by Colin Leroy, Andy S Maloney, Philip Tellis, Edward. L. Haletky, Tahir Hashmi, Torrey Searle Siddhesh Poyarekar
Latest release 0.5.0-45 / 4 June 2008
OS Cross-platform
Genre Instant messaging client
Licence GPL
Website ayttm.sourceforge.net

Ayttm is a universal instant messaging client that provides all-in-one chat functionality for several major instant messaging services from one simple program. It is the heir of the Everybuddy project.

Contents

[edit] Features

[edit] Services

Ayttm primarily supports one to one and group chatting on MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AIM, Jabber and IRC. It also has support for sending rudimentary emails via SMTP, which may be used to send SMS via email to SMS gateways. Ayttm also supports webcams on Yahoo! Messenger, and voice chatting over MSN using gnomemeeting.

Service summary:

[edit] Fallback messaging

The feature that sets Ayttm apart from other universal electronic communication services is a feature known as fallback messaging. It allows you to group multiple service accounts of the same person under a Contact identifier. If you are chatting with a contact and the service you are using fails, Ayttm can automatically and seamlessly fall back to other service protocols. This results in an uninterrupted chat session for users on ayttm.

[edit] Autotranslation

Ayttm has a few fun features as well, including language translation. Each contact may be associated with a language, and ayttm can automatically translate text messages from the user's primary language to the language of a contact. Ayttm uses the Babelfish translation service, and results in translations that are often more amusing than accurate.

[edit] Aycryption

Aycryption is a filter that facilitates encrypted chat using GPG keys. All outgoing text is encrypted using the remote contact's public key, and incoming encrypted text is decrypted using the local private key.

[edit] Plugins

Ayttm's plugin architecture makes it possible for new protocol support to be added without modifying the core application. Plugins must be compiled against a version of the core and will only work with core versions that are binary compatibile with the core version that the plugin was built against.

Five types of plugins are supported:

  • Service plugins - for protocol support. eg: MSN.
  • Filter plugins - to modify incoming and outgoing messages. eg: Auto translation, aycryption
  • Importers - to import contacts and accounts from other messengers.
  • Smileys - a smiley pack
  • Utility - to add functionality. eg: Video capture, notes.

[edit] History

Towards the end of 2002, the everybuddy project started to stagnate and suffered from two major problems: Instability and a complicated set of preferences. The development team split into two to fix the problem. One group, led by Meredydd Luff started on a rewrite that was to be the long term solution. This resulted in the eb-lite project. The other group led by Colin Leroy decided to fix all of the primary issues of everybuddy and work on features only after stabilising the core. The result was Ayttm.

Ayttm first made it into savannah's CVS repository on December 21, 2002, and almost daily developer releases were made: ChangeLog. It was first announced on Freshmeat on December 27, 2002.

On March 31, 2003, citing availability issues with Savannah, the project was moved to Sourceforge where it remains to date. Version 0.2.2 of Ayttm was released on April 1, 2003.

The latest release of Ayttm is 0.5.0-45 and was made on June 4, 2008 by Siddhesh Poyarekar.

[edit] The name

Ayttm was initially meant to be Yattm. The reasons for this are unknown. When the project was registered on Savannah by Colin Leroy, he misspelled Yattm, resulting in a project known as Ayttm. The CVS log on Savannah shows that the executable name was changed from yattm to ayttm on January 16, 2003. No expansion for Ayttm was provided at this time.

Several expansions of the name were attempted, and the one settled on was "Are You Talking To Me?". The question mark is part of the name. The name Ayttm is a backronym and credit for coining this term goes to Natasha Sharma.

[edit] Pronunciation

When spoken, ayttm is pronounced "item" or "Ay-wai-tee-tee-em".

The expansion is stated as a question, which often results in exchanges as follows:

  What does "Ayttm" stand for?
     Are you talking to me?
  Yes, I am.

[edit] Other expansions

Some of the other expansions tried were:

  • Ayt the messenger (title on Savannah project page)
  • Ain't You ToTally Mad?
  • Ayttm's Your True Time Messenger

[edit] Platforms

Ayttm is known to run on the following platforms:

Several ports use the GTK+ graphical widget toolkit.

[edit] Copyright & Licence

The software is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and is Copyright the Ayttm team.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Mentions by the press

Languages