I needed a Jabber (oops, I mean XMPP) client for Mac OS 9. What? Mac OS 9? What am I doing, some crazy time-travel experiment?
No, I stopped working on my time-travel experiments in the year 3042, but anyway… I didn’t have to look far. I just looked back to August 2000 when I last mentioned Jabbernaut.
Sure Jabbernaut is no longer being developed, but lucky for us it’s open-source, so it’s still available. Oh, lucky for us it’s hosted at SourceForge, so we can actually download it. (Though I’m sure I have a backup on CD… In a box… Somewhere…) And most importantly, we are lucky that the Jabber protocols have not been changed for silly reasons over the years. Open-source, open-protocols, they’re good things… Do you think a 4 year old version of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger would still work today? (It might, I don’t know for sure, this isn’t one of those rhetorical questions, I honestly don’t know!)
If I haven’t mentioned it recently, I’m a big fan of Jabber (I mean XMPP!) It’s another one of those “edge technologies” that I keep wishing and waiting for to just take off. Next year will be the year it does. I’m sure of it. (Right Apple?)