New Feature: Welcome Screen

I had a fruitful weekend of experimenting with the CSS capabilities limitations of Internet Explorer 8, among other things. The result is a dialog to welcome new users. A forum feed is integrated to create a tighter Pandion user community.

Gratuitous screenshot:


This feature is available now in Pandion 2.6.35 (development track).

The large button icons are courtesy of the spectacular GPL collection Hydroxygen.

XMPP Client Usage

Friends over at JabberES.org, the Spanish Jabber community website, sent over some nice statistics. This shows the popularity of various XMPP clients today at peak time on the jabberes.org domain. ¡Viva el Pandion!

Announcement: Pandion 2.6.33 Beta

I am very pleased to announce a beta version of Pandion. This is a major step towards the upcoming Pandion 2.6.x stable release.

Download:
Pandion_2.6.33.msi on SourceForge

Release information:
Pandion Installer and Auto-Update Improvements

Detailed changelog:
GitHub Commit History

To stay up to date with the latest releases of Pandion, subscribe to the appcasting feed, follow @pandion on Twitter, or become a fan of the Facebook.com/pandion.im page.

Pandion Installer and Auto-Update Improvements

The last couple of weeks have brought major infrastructural changes to Pandion.

• Updates have been divided across three tracks: stable, beta, and development. Through beta or development versions users can enjoy new features and bug fixes before they go mainstream. This creates a tighter feedback loop between developers and users.
• Pandion includes a new dialog to manually check for updates, although of course this happens automatically too. This dialog is also used to switch update tracks.
  
  
• The updates are announced to Pandion users through an appcast feed. This feed can also be subscribed by any Atom 1.0-compatible news reader.
• The installer is now based on Windows Installer (*.msi) packages. This makes customization, deployment and maintenance easier for system administrators and has long been a popular request.
• The new installer works without administrative access and does not trigger User Access Control (UAC) warnings.
• Development now follows a continuous integration process powered by Hudson. This means a dedicated build server tracks any changes to the source code to automatically compile and package new versions. These are deployed automatically to (brave) users through the "development" update track.