After getting everyone used to a rapid cycle with new builds every 2-7 days since our beta launch, it has been 6 weeks since we pushed the last update. WTF? Such a slow development cycle is unlike us so we wanted to give you a quick update on what’s going on. I’m sure you are all eager for the new build, as we are! The upcoming release is taking longer to wrap up because it is a pretty major release. Since our public beta launch on March 20th, the #1 complaint we have heard about Digsby is that it uses too much RAM. Our explanation has always been that we released the beta without optimizing and that we would take some time to do it once the major bugs were fixed.

When the last build was pushed we decided that it was time to buckle down and get to work on the optimizations we’ve been promising! The goal was to significantly lowering RAM usage and also to improve the responsiveness of the GUI. Many people have reported that Digsby is taking 70MB - 110MB during normal use. If you leave Digsby running for several days without restarting, the memory leaks caused RAM usage to climb to 150MB+ on some systems. That is completely unacceptable by our standards!

This has been a massive undertaking and we finally have the new version built. We are testing it internally. Because this was such a major change in architecture we introduced some new bugs. We are pushing as fast as we can to fix these so we can get it out to you guys. We don’t have an exact ETA since there is a lot of uncertainty in guessing how long it will take to fix a particular bug and we are still finding new ones. However, rest assured that we are working as hard as we can to finish as quickly as possible!

RAM and performance are not the only things we have been working on. This build also introduces a ton of bug fixes and enhancements. If you have been experiencing a bug, chances are that the upcoming build will fix it. We closed over 100 tickets in our project management system since the last build! As always, we will list all the changes in the Change Log when the update goes live. For those of you who are new to Digsby, it will update the next time you launch it after an update goes live. You don’t need to download or run anything.

On another note, we added a Getting Started guide and a section for FAQ and Common Issues to the documentation wiki to help new users get started. We want to thank you for all your support so far. We will keep pushing to make Digsby even better and greatly appreciate all your feedback and words of encouragement!

The AIM login servers are down. This is system wide and you will not be able to log in with AIM 5.9, AIM in Gmail, Digsby, or other third party IM clients. AIM 6+ connects to a different set of servers and connectivity seems to be more reliable if you need a temporary solution. We will post an update here once service is restored.

Update: It looks like the AIM servers are back online.

Update 2: AIM servers are down again as of June 19th, 11:00am EST

Update 3: It looks like AIM servers are back online as of June 19th, 11:20am EST

ReadWriteWeb is holding a poll to see what the best IM clients are. This is a follow-up to an article they wrote about IM interoperability, in which they boldly stated:

Digsby is poised to take a serious amount from the market share of the standard clients because of its interoperability not only with IM clients, but also because of the integrated social networks and even email. It makes me wonder if maybe Digsby is poised to be the “Firefox” of instant messaging if the dominating players aren’t careful.

Please show your support by voting for us: ReadWriteWeb Poll

On another note, it has been 2.5 weeks since our last release, which is uncharacteristic of us. As the bug reports began to die off, we have bunkered down to fully optimize our codebase. The next release will bring a few significant improvements including:

• Major reduction in RAM (memory) usage
• Fixes for most of the memory leaks
• A much more responsive user interface
• Ability to connect to IM networks even if your firewall/proxy restricts that port

Twitter has been experiencing server-side issues with their system so they temporarily lowered the limit of requests applications can make from 70/hour to 30/hour. You can adjust your request levels by double clicking on your Twitter account in preferences and choosing “Advanced” - otherwise you will hit rate limits and not receive updates.

They have also created a website where you can monitor their status and they will announce when the limit is brought back to 70/hour on there: http://status.twitter.com.

The MSN buddy list servers are down so you will not be able to log in MSN Messenger. You may be able to log in with the official client because it caches your buddy list on the hard drive. We will let you know when we see the servers come back online.

Update: It looks like they fixed the issue pretty quickly. MSN should be able to connect now.

We are proud to announce that we have been nominated for the About.com 2008 IM Best Awards! We are nominated in five categories:

• Best Instant Messenger Experience (Digsby)
• Most Improved Instant Messenger (Digsby)
• Best Third-Party IM (Digsby)
• Best IM Feature (Social Networking and Email Integration)
• IM Developers of the Year (dotSyntax, LLC)

Please show your support by voting for us: http://im.about.com/od/imreviews/a/IMBest.htm

The results will be announced on April 21st and winners in each category will be given featured placement for one year on http://im.about.com.

We’ve gotten reports of people being unable to connect to AIM and ICQ. The official client yields the same results - their servers are down but only for certain accounts. We are having trouble logging into AIM Mail on those same accounts. We will keep you posted here.

Update:

We just pushed a small update for a bug we introduced so the new revision is r13047. AIM servers are still down but we will update you as soon as we know more.

Update 2:

AIM/ICQ servers appear to be back to normal

We’ve gotten reports of people being unable to connect to MSN Messenger. The official client yields the same results - their servers are down. But digsby lives on! We will keep you posted here.

Edit:

Everything seems to be back to normal and we are able to log in MSN Messenger from both the official client and digsby consistently.

We just noticed a change in the AIM protocol - a new family of features has been added (family 0×25) that we have never seen before. It hasn’t been added to all the AIM servers yet so some of you will still be able to connect without a problem and some of you might get stuck in the Authenticating state. We are working on a fix right now and will push an update very shortly. We will update this post after it is pushed.

Edit:

We just pushed an update (Build 16, r12552) that fixes the AIM login problem along with several bug fixes and enhancements. You should be able to log in to AIM without any issues now. The list of changes can be found on our Change Log. So, what just happened? When we were developing the AIM protocol we designed it to break if we ever got something we never saw before. This raised a red flag so we could implement it. Since AOL adds features every now and then to the AIM protocol, this should have been turned off when we released digsby. Earlier today we saw a new set of capabilities on the AIM protocol (family 0×25) and that prevented us from logging in. The fix we just pushed does what should have been done at launch - ignore new capabilities instead of raising a red flag.