Pandion 2.6.90 Stable Release

The Pandion team is proud to announce the release of Pandion 2.6.90 stable. This release is the culmination of our effort over the past months to create a reliable and well tested application. All known major bugs have been addressed. Many features have been improved and added. Large parts of the application were redesigned and rearchitected. No animals were harmed.

Download

The latest stable version of Pandion can be downloaded directly from:
http://pandion.im/pandion_setup.msi

Notable Improvements

• Shiny new user interface theme.
• Contact list keyboard search for easier access to contacts. Supports find-as-you-type.
• Multi-row tabs to keep unlimited conversations open.
• Additional emoticon styles.
• HTTP proxy support when downloading extensions and updates.
• Faster sign-in process thanks to improved networking layer.
• Fixed many crashes, script errors and disconnection bugs.
• Redesigned Sign In dialog, Welcome Screen, Auto-Update dialog and About dialog.
• Single Sign On (SSO) support for the SASL mechanisms GSSAPI, NTLM and SP-NEGO.
• Update track selection: Help to test by choosing from stable, beta or development.
• Better standards compliance and protocol tweaks for compatibility with other XMPP software.
• Windows Installer compatible *.msi setup package for easier network deployment through Group Policy Objects (GPO).
• Right to left user interface for Arabic and Hebrew.
• Total of 29 translations: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese.

EULA No More

Pandion 2.6.90 is published under GNU General Public License 3 or later. This is a copyright license without restrictions on usage. There is simply no End User License Agreement (EULA) anymore. Enjoy freedom!

Update Instructions

• Manual
  Download and run the installer. Pandion will uninstall any older vesion, install the update, and launch automatically.
• From Pandion 2.6.x
  The auto-update service in Pandion 2.6 automatically downloads and installs the update. When the update is ready users are prompted to restart Pandion.
• From legacy Pandion 2.5
  Users of the legacy Pandion 2.5 version are notified through the auto-update mechanism. This mechanism is not compatible with certain types of HTTP proxy servers. As a fallback the download page opens in the default web browser to manually download and install the Pandion update.
  Note: The Pandion 2.6.90 installer automatically removes Pandion 2.5 from the system before deploying the new version.

Development Facts

Since starting work on Pandion 2.6 there have been:

• 73 issues reported, 42 closed
• 90 automated builds
• 389 source code commits
• 285 discussions by 418 people
• 6,286 daily users
• 39,615 auto-updates

Downloads and Updates Report

Last December Pandion 2.6 was made available for download from the official website. Before that only a handful of brave testers were using the development builds.

The overwhelming majority of users are still running Pandion 2.5, released over four years ago, and probably oblivious to the recent rebirth of the project. But Pandion 2.6 is stable enough for release so soon all Pandion 2.5 users will receive an update notification.

I collected data on the last two months of Pandion 2.6 distribution. Three accurate data sources are available:

1. FeedBurner: Number of daily users and auto-updates.
   The Pandion 2.6 update mechanism polls an Atom feed proxied by FeedBurner. This service provides detailed statistics on the number of users ("Subscribers"), as well as their Pandion version and language setting by parsing the User-Agent HTTP header.
2. Google Analytics: Website visitors and downloads.
   The pandion.im website contains a Google Analytics tracking cookie and a custom hook to track manual downloads of the Pandion installer. These downloads are served directly by the pandion.im web server and do not add to the download count of the SourceForge data.
3. SourceForge: Auto-update downloads.
   When a new version of Pandion is available all clients automatically download it from the SourceForge content delivery network. Occasionally someone will manually visit this page to download a development build but this is likely negligible.

So what does it add up to?

Blue: Usage is climbing at a high rate, week after week. This is a good sign! The weekend dips indicate that Pandion is used in many professional environments.

Red: The spikes are updates of stable builds. The huge majority of users is on the stable update track. The beta and development tracks are much less popular but important nonetheless. Making it easy for testers to try beta and development builds has helped us find and fix many bugs.

Blue: Download traffic is stable. Combined with the usage growth shown above this implies that people continue using Pandion rather than just downloading, trying and uninstalling. Again a good sign.

This graph is a little deceptive. The Y-axis scale is logarithmic. And the X-axis shows version numbers, not dates.

So this graph shows that 2.6.70 and 2.6.86 are orders of magnitude more popular than any other version. That is because they are both the stable builds. What's interesting is that 2.6.86 reached the same number of auto-updates in a few days as 2.6.70 reached in about two months.

Conclusion

This provides a little insight into Pandion 2.6 usage and a point of reference for future growth. I would like to automate this data collection and analysis. Having a live graph of our progress towards world domination would be fun and motivating.

Pandion Team at FOSDEM 2010 and XMPP Summit 8

In a few days, from Feb 5th to 7th, it's time for the largest free software developer conference in Europe. The 2010 edition of FOSDEM takes place in Brussels and has a strong line-up of topics and speakers.

Simultaneously and also in Brussels the XMPP Standards Foundation is organising its twice yearly XMPP Summit. It starts on Friday, a day before FOSDEM, with an XMPP Hackfest where developers from different projects join forces to tackle compatibility issues and discuss new ideas. Many XSF members are giving talks at FOSDEM on XMPP and will also be there to discuss the future of XMPP on Monday at the Summit.

Both Pandion developers (Sebastiaan and Dries) will be in attendance at these events. We look forward to meeting like minded open source developers and XMPP enthousiasts. Drop us a line if you want to meet up.