Fire (instant messaging client)

Fire was an instant messaging client for Mac OS X (previously for OPENSTEP), that can access IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Bonjour. All services are built on GPL’d libraries, including firetalk, libfaim, libicq2000, libmsn, XMPP, and libyahoo2. Fire supports OS X v10.1 and higher.

Fire
Original author(s)Eric Peyton, Colter Reed
Developer(s)Fire developers
Initial releaseApril 1, 1999 (1999-04-01)
Final release1.5.6 (February 16, 2006) [±]
Preview releaseN/A [±]
Written inObjective-C
Operating systemMac OS X
Available in?
TypeInstant messaging client
LicenseGPL (free software)
Websitefire.sourceforge.net

The latest version of Fire is 1.5.6. The program was released under the GNU General Public License.

On 2007-02-23, it was announced that there would be no future versions of Fire released. The official Fire website stated there were several reasons, the biggest being the loss of its developers, and also the fact that most of the libraries used by Fire were no longer in active development. Two of Fire's developers joined the Adium team and proceeded wrote a transition path for users to move from Fire to Adium. The announcement recommended Adium for future IM needs.[1] Fire remains dormant today.

History

In the early beta days of Mac OS X, Eric Peyton wanted to have an IM client which would run on it. However, all of the official client vendors had not yet supported Mac OS X, so Peyton started expanding on an OPENSTEP project he had been working on, which used an open source library to connect with AIM servers. He started porting this using the new Cocoa libraries on Mac OS X, and a new IM client began to take shape.

Development in the early days was fast and furious and Fire was touted by Apple as one of the keystone applications on Mac OS X v10.0. Peyton initially hosted the application and did all the development on his own equipment. He then formed the corporation "Epicware" to protect himself from the lawyers of the huge corporations he was interacting with.

The application was expanded to include the ability to talk to multiple servers. First Yahoo! and ICQ were added, followed by IRC, Microsoft, and XMPP. The most recent support added was for Bonjour.

Because service providers at this time used proprietary protocols to facilitate vendor lock in, Fire would often stop working with some of its major services until the application, or one of the component libraries had been updated.

In 2001, Colter Reed started contributing to the development of Fire on a regular basis and became the second major developer of Fire. They collaborated for a while using the Epicware hardware and finally decided to move the project to SourceForge to take advantage of the free hosting, download, and mirror services available there. Version 0.28.a was the first release that used the SourceForge System.

From 2003-2007, the primary development of Fire was transferred to Graham Booker, Alan Humpherys, and many others who participated in development, as well as the localization of the application.

On 2007-02-23, development of Fire officially ended as the Fire developers joined forces with the Adium development team to focus on a single IM application supporting Mac OS X.

See also

References
  1. "Fire / [Fire-core] Fire's End".
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