Carrier Instant Messenger – Upgraded to 2.5
It took a while and surely some people gave up on the project because of the wait, but Carrier has finally been upgraded to version 2.5. This is is significant because the previous version of 2.4.1 had stopped working with the MSN protocol, rendering it useless for anyone who exclusively used those accounts. Version 2.4.1 was released in April and somewhere along the line, the MSN protocol changed and despite requests in the forums, things seemed at a standstill. It wasn’t until late August that the software was updated. There are a lot of great reasons in theory to support the Carrier project, but ultimately we all need a working IM. I even explored the use of Empathy which is going to be the default IM application in future releases of Gnome. It shows a lot of promise and is being developed actively and upgraded regularly which is great. The main difference or advantage between Empathy and traditional IMs is that it will support voice chat and also integrate into Gnome’s environment. An example of this would be that you would see an icon to call someone from within the Evolution email client. It will take some time to move things forward but the future does look promising for Empathy and Gnome.
In terms of the future of Carrier, we can only hope that the recent past is not an indication of future development. Carrier has a great opportunity to attract users. It won’t attract as many as it did when it initially started though since one of the main reasons for its creation was to enable the text resizing box during chats and secondly Pidgin is still the defacto IM client included with a lot of distros. While a lot of Linux users will put forth the extra effort to replace Pidgin with Carrier if they feel strongly enough about it, for most people, they are likely to leave well enough alone.
I am not giving up on Carrier yet though. The current version took a bit long for my liking to be released, but it’s here now and it works very well.
My advice for the developers at Carrier would be to make packages readily available for various distros including the most up to date version and make them easy to find on the website. For example. the preamble for the Ubuntu version still links to version 2.4.1. Also, keep up to date and respond to people in the forums more regularly. After all, from your main stanza on the homepage, you indicate: “What makes us different from the official client, is that we work for you.” If that is truly the case, then it needs to be demonstrated fully.