[blizzard]

Hey all you developer-types. I've got a potential carbonization project for any of you, should you feel the time or inclination to do something for the good of the community. It concerns my most favourite little app ever...Gerry's ICQ. For classic, I consider it to be a paragon of Mac-ness...everything works so well, and is so well done, that it never failed to amaze me how much thought and effort went into it. Unfortunately, the developer, Gerry (a fellow Canuck, too), got caught with a machine unable to run OS X, so when he tried to carbonize the app, he was only able to get it into a mildly useable state before he had to give up. Realizing that he couldn't do it himself, he posted the source at http://homepage.mac.com/gerrysicq/GerrysICQSource.sit

Anyways, that's about all the story I can think of...I know there would be a fair number of people running OS X who would love to have this great little program back, and I can't see it being too much trouble seeing as how it's already about 60% of the way there. If you want any help (not programming, I couldn't program my way out of a wet paper bag, but maybe finding bugs or stuff) I would be glad to offer you whatever I could. Until then, thanks for your time, and have a nice day.

Blizzard.

[naepstn]

I too would love to see a new OSX version of Gerry's ICQ. I have been using the first and only carbonized version of Gerry's since March 24th, and it is actually pretty solid (except for the bug that crashes the app if you hit the green maximize widget), though is pretty sluggish. I have yet to upgrade to 10.1 (one of this weekend's projects), so don't know if it breaks with the upgrade or not.

Unfortunately, I also have no real programming abilities, though am looking at trying to learn some Cocoa in my limited spare time. I'd be willing to contribute whatever I could, in terms of interface design (I do some of that at my job) and beta testing though.

Please, someone breath some life back into Gerry!?!
Cheers!

[blizzard]

I'll try to hit up as many forums I can with a similar message...but I can't think of any offhand that have a focused Developer forum like MacNN. Anyone know of any? Because I really would love to get this app up and running again in a fully functional state. Fire, cool as it seems, drops ICQ messages like they were hot potatoes.

[amonitzer]

I've written a Cocoa-UI around the ICQ-network part of Gerry's ICQ. Works pretty well, but is far from complete. ICQ has much functionality (messages, URLs, files, contacts, etc), and I've yet to find a nice OOP-abstraction for it.

[blizzard]

I remember reading in an interview with Gerry that he said basically everything but the Open Transport part of the program was written as an object and then tied in to the rest of project...could this mean that it's possible to selectively use or discard different parts of the program based on how well they work in X? Also, if the networking itself is a big part of the problem, would it be possible to take the Fire open source and then tie whatever ICQ protocols (which we know work...uhh, fairly well..in OS X)? The only problem there would be that that might carry over the ICQ problems that Fire has that are preventing me from using it...but the main problem with GICQ right now is that the interface and whatnot aren't carbonized all that well. I never had any problems with the networking part of it, which suggests that it would be ok to use it in its current form.

amonitzer, could you tell us any more about what you've done? I think it would interesting to see what you've done and why you've done it...this is sort of an area of interest to me, and hopefully to others as well.

Thanks again!

Blizzard.

P.S I tried to talk to Gerry on ICQ to get some idea of who else is working on a possible port, but he didn't respond to my message, which either suggests that he has 'Ignore all users not on contact list' turned on or that he's not interested in helping. Either way...one easy source of information has just been eliminated

[Edgar]

I've messed around with Gerry's code a bit and managed to get it to compile in Project Builder. As well I fixed a couple bugs (zoom box, quit menu, new users) and probably added a few too . I'll see if i can fix it up a bit more but I don't have much experience with networking.

A pure cocoa app is probably the way to go, but until then it'd be nice to have a usable carbon version.

I haven't made any fundamental changes but I've put the source and app on my iDisk for anyone interested.

-Edgar

[blizzard]

Hey, thanks Edgar...it works quite a bit better. Three major issues have carried over, if you're interested (thankfully none of them have anything to do with networking):

1.) If you double click on someone to send a message to them, the message window doesn't contain a cursor unless you click in it.

2.) If you make a change to the preferences and then save, AND if you have an image set as your background, the image disappears and is replaced by a solid colour.

3.) If you minimize the window and then maximize it, the app crashes.

Those are the three biggies that I've noticed in five minute's operation...but it's definitely an improvement. Thanks!

[ 10-16-2001: Message edited by: blizzard ]

[Elifarley]

Originally posted by blizzard:
<STRONG>

1.) If you double click on someone to send a message to them, the message window doesn't contain a cursor unless you click in it.

2.) If you make a change to the preferences and then save, AND if you have an image set as your background, the image disappears and is replaced by a solid colour.

3.) If you minimize the window and then maximize it, the app crashes.

Those are the three biggies that I've noticed in five minute's operation...but it's definitely an improvement. Thanks!

</STRONG>

3) - Fixed. This one was really simple to hunt and fix. Should I email you the final app or just the change ? (I'm in a hurry now, so I can't put it in my home page. Take a look at http://www.geocities.com/elifarley/projects/ tomorrow night and it'll be probably there)

I'll see if I can find some more spare time to correct the other bugs you mentioned.

Please let me know if you find more bugs, but unfortunately I cannot PROMISE I'll fix them all (well, when I have some more spare time, I'll probably do)

And remember, I've just started learning Project Builder, ObjectiveC, Cocoa and Carbon, so don't expect much ;-)

If anyone wants to discuss the development of gICQ, just drop me a line.

[blizzard]

Hey, good stuff, Elifarley! If you liked, you could email either the app or the source...but what I had in mind was perhaps, if the demand was there, or if people just wanted to see what was going on, I could make a web page where I could post both binaries and source code, so that not only could end users like myself use the new, improved application, but budding developers could see the source code, see what has been changed, and even make improvements or changes to it themselves and then hopefully email me the changes so that they, in turn, could be posted. I think that would be a lot of fun...resulting in both learning, and in a wonderful, useful little app that we could all use. That's the idea, anyways. You guys let me know what you think...I'm impressed with the responses I'm getting here. Thanks a lot, guys! If any of you wants to contact me with information or ideas, you can reach me on ICQ at #55541682, or via email at blizzard_50@hotmail.com

[ 10-18-2001: Message edited by: blizzard ]

[Angus_D]

Why not sign up on SourceForge?

[amonitzer]

The networking code is very well separated and uses Open Transport with cooperative threads. It works amazingly seamless in Cocoa (using an idle-task hack using notifications).
However, you need the ObjC++-Compiler that came with Puma, since Gerry didn't write it in ANSI C (shame on him).

Is anybody interested in getting the source? It's very raw, has no preferences (the contact list and the own uin/password is hardcoded), but it demonstrates how to do it.

[ 10-18-2001: Message edited by: amonitzer ]

[blizzard]

Amonitzer; are you planning in on working on it any more, out of curiosity? If this web page thing goes up then I'd love to grab the source from you, but we shall see. I'd grab it just for the hell of it but I wouldn't have a clue what it meant or what it did.

In other news. I spent five minutes today going through the program and noting some of the more obvious UI errors, as well as a few network problems...here they are, if anyone's interested or has the time.

Network
-Update info doesn't work.
-Save User Info doesn't work.
-Has a tendency to randomly disconnect every once in a while, but it does this in the Classic version as well, so I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to fix this.

UI
-scroll arrow is obscured in message history window.
-In 'send file' window, 'Remove', 'Add' buttons collide.
-the 'Lists' window 'Cancel' and 'Save' buttons are cut off at the top.
-errors in 'Preferences' window where the drop menu leaves two thingies.

Other
-Can't change voices in 'Text-to-speech' window.

[Elifarley]

Hmm... What if we all work to improve Fire, instead of gICQ?

[tobli]

For some time now I've been working on an ICQ library using Cocoa, BSD networking, multithreading and other buzzwords. I now have a framework that works fairly well, supporting all types of messages, file transfers, multiple user chat and more. In parallell I'm also hacking on a client application that uses this framework. All this is done in my spare time, something that I'm a bit short on at the moment since I'm just moving and starting to work on my masters thesis.

Although many parts of the public APIs are more or less completed, others are very much in flux. I was planning on releasing this thing once I've finished it a bit more. Reading this thread makes me realize that people are working on different icq projects, and it's always good if you can avoid duplicate efforts.

So, if there's serious interest from people out there in writing a client for my APIs I might consider releasing it a bit earlier than originally planned, and without my own client (since I really want to put some effort into that rather than releasing something that would just be pre-alfa quality). Some of the reasons I'm reluctant to doing this: first of all I don't feel that I have the time to answer lots of questions and feature requests about the code. Gerry is a friend of mine, and he was forced to be in invisible status on icq for over a year to avoid the stream of messages people were sending him when they saw him online. Not to say that my code is great and will be as wide spread as GICQ, but anyway... The second reason is that it doesn't feel good release something that I know isn't finished yet

To conclude this rather lengthy post: if you are a Cocoa developer wanting to develop an ICQ client, and you can cope with an API that's still in development and will change under your feet during development - make your voice heard below! Depending on the response I'll decide where to go next with this.

/Tobias

[naepstn]

Well, as I said above, I'd be glad to do whatever I can on it in my very limited spare time, but I have almost no programming experience, so I'd be worried I'd be more of a hinderance than a benefit to the effort. I could do extensive testing on both my B&W G3 and my new iBook, hunt down bugs and do some interface design.

I'd love to see an OS X version of Gerry's (or another improved great ICQ client) come to fruition through an open-source project like this. SourceForge probably would be the best place to host a site for this project though, as it's already set up for this kind of task (not to mention the new testing farm).

Cheers!
N

[blizzard]

OK, here's the deal as it stands so far, guys; I asked the MacNN big boys if they could lend some assistance, and they agreed to put up a short blurb on the front page pointing people to this thread. Hopefully that'll lend the project some critical mass. Further, I'm going to try to draft a page similar to the one I described above, which would be hosted by MacNN and provide a base so that 'duplicate efforts' could hopefully be avoided. The only problem that we saw with SourceFourge was that it was heavily focused towards Unix and Windows programs. We feel that if we keep it on or near MacNN then the people who should be seeing it will be more likely to see it. It's obvious that we have some very talented programmers here, as well as some very talented UI designers. So I'm going to spend some of my spare time drafting up this web page, and hopefully I'll have something up by the end of the weekend.

In the meantime...there have been some interesting points raised. First of all, the reason I would prefer not to use Fire as a basis rather than GICQ is that I simply don't like Fire's interface. Granted, with work, we could make it better, but it seems to me it would be a lot less work to build GICQ into a great application than it would to build Fire into a great application. Plus, with GICQ we can keep focus on ICQ, without having to worry about those other IM protocols. But that does raise some issues...do you guys think that our time would be better invested in building a Cocoa app like Fire, with all of its advantages? Or would you be willing to accept a Carbon application? Or maybe even work on both...I dunno, I'm just the middle man. You tell me.

Tobli, it sounds like you've made some impressive progress with your project...would you consider releasing it to me for this project if contact with you were to be limited to this forum? Also, if you and amonitzer could talk to one another, it sounds like your two projects might be complementary.

So, impressions? Cocoa or Carbon? GICQ as the basis, or start from Fire or even scratch, using some of the work described above as the basis? Or maybe all of the above, to see what turns out better? Or, of course, there is also the possibility that I'm trying to make too much of too little, in which case I could leave this fairly well alone and let it remain a hobby for different people to try...your call

[Bouba]

Use gerry, it'll be easier! it already has a lot of features, and they are well implemented..

just build an application only for os X , not an Hybrid...

add a toolbar à la OS X and a drawer to put the history.

This thing will rock!

[The DJ]

I think you people should start a Sourceforge project and get on it. Just a simple site and CVS i'd say.
GerryICQ was just perfect, and it would be a shame not to continue dev on it. I would be glad to help, but i only know Cocoa. I don't know a thing about Carbon and Classic programming.

DJ

[tobli]

The options for developing a Mac OS X native icq clone are, as I see it:
- start with the GICQ source and continue working on that
- use Gerry's ICQ library and develop a Carbon app on top of it
- use one of the free icq libraries available out there, such as icqlib. Since they are often written in ANSI C it's possible to use them in both Carbon and Cocoa apps (Fire uses icqlib)
- build a Cocoa application using a framework with a Obj-C API to do the icq protocol and network stuff
- dont do it, wait until somebody else does it

Judging from the discussion in this forum it seems like most people are interested in the first route. If you know Carbon, I'd say that makes the most sense.

[Elvin]

I personally really can't wait and would like to support this endevor in any way I can (unfortunatly I don't know anything about programming so I'm probably not any help).

I would like to see a dedicated site for this project, and think that SourceForge is a good location. Take a look at the main page at http://sourceforge.net/ and tell me what the fourth most active project is? An ICQ clone for the PC. So someone is getting support there at least.

Also notice that Fire
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fire/
and another ICQ clone in the first stages IXQ is also at SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ixq/

unfortunatly it is suffering from the same problems that GICQ was suffering from. No support on the programming side.

However keeping it located on a Mac only site is a great idea if we can do it. That way it keeps a more Mac-feel to it.

Just a couple of questions....

1) Can this be converted in to an Open Source project? (with Gerry's permission of course) That way he could contribute if he ever feels like it, and we seem to have a few people that are interested.

2) What are the benefits of carbon and cocoa? I'd like to see a Cocoa app, that way there would be native spell check support...but I'm just looking at it from an end user's perspecitve.

Anyway, keep up the great work!

[amonitzer]

My version (Cocoa app with Gerry's ICQ-networking code) is available here:

ICQTest.tgz

Note that the application design is very bad. The problem is that all callbacks are called from a secondary (cooperative) thread. Cocoa UI needs the main thread, so I send the application an application defined event (that's the only way I know of to communicate between threads without DO). However, to add a new event (like chatting), you'd need to add code on three places:

• The C-callback (to send the event)
• The NSApplication-subclass (to catch the event)
• ICQHandler (to handle the event)

This has to be changed (maybe sending an invocation with the event would help, or DO).
To get the code running, you have to enter your own ICQ UIN and password in ICQHandler's -init (search for "// !!!").
There's currently only one person on the contact list (myself). It should be quite clear how to add more.
The code uses NSLog to tell you its current status, so take a look at the console (in PB while running it from PB) while testing.

btw, the only things working are sending and receiving messages and status updates.

have fun!

andy

[naepstn]

Well, as I said above, I'd be glad to do whatever I can on it in my very limited spare time, but I have almost no programming experience, so I'd be worried I'd be more of a hinderance than a benefit to the effort. I could do extensive testing on both my B&W G3 and my new iBook, hunt down bugs and do some interface design.

I'd love to see an OS X version of Gerry's (or another improved great ICQ client) come to fruition through an open-source project like this. SourceForge probably would be the best place to host a site for this project though, as it's already set up for this kind of task (not to mention the new testing farm).

Cheers!
N

[blizzard]

I have emailed Gerry seeking clarification as to his release terms, and asking for his approval, suggestions, and concerns. Between the email and the ICQ message, I think I've covered that base well enough. I'll check out SourceForge for more info and see if that'll be a possibility...who knows, maybe we could get both pages working in tandem. Beyond that, I'll spend some time this weekend compiling information, files, and suggestions, and we'll see what I come up with in the meantime. Keep the suggestions coming!

[blizzard]

Hey all, I was up until the wee hours of Saturday morning working on the web page, and you can find a preview of it up on my friend's web server....go here and feel free to offer constructive criticism on it. Keep in mind that it's the product of working at 3:30 in the morning subsisting entirely on a diet of Ritz and Caramilk bars..go easy on me

If all goes well, MacNN should be able to host the site soon...just have to wait until the big boys get back in tomorrow to check it out. All of the files offered in this thread are available on the page, as well...and if anyone feels like their work or suggestions were under-represented, please let me know.

Night all...time for bed.

[Bouba]

Really good job!!! now we should make some more announcements about this!

Apparently, an AIM client has been made in cocoa and I've heard that it is really good...
let's take a look at it and include some of its features!


By the way, under 10.1, when you double-click a user under GICQ, a new message window appears, but the insertion point is not there, so you have to click in the dialog to activate it...

it should be easy to fix!

[davecom]

I don't use ICQ, but I think maybe the library that Tobli made should be further developed to work with Fire.

[blizzard]

Yeah, the issue is sort of sitting pretty in the Mod forum right now, so I think I'll try to make up a front page post and see if we can't get this rolling a bit...it's been slow this week, and I dunno why. Was hoping the project hadn't died already! But we'll see what we can do. Thanks for the input and talk to you soon (I hope).

[blizzard]

Uh, ok, are any of you guys still here? Seems pretty dead to me...

[Bouba]

No! I'm still there! I'm the proud supporter of the Gerry ICQ resurection on os X!

Come on guys! a little effort!!! you can do it!!!

don't give up! please! (or I'll be obliged to learn to program to do it myself!)

Come on!

[tobli]

I've just moved and now I finally have internet access again. Give me a few days and I'll see what I can do to contribute.

[naepstn]

Yup, still here! (For all it's worth).
Can't wait to see this thing get rolling!
Cheers!

[exrae]

I'd be interesting in starting (and/or working with others) to create a full and fully Cocoa client for those APIs Tobli, as long as it uses the v7 ICQ protocol of course

[blizzard]

OK, glad to see people are still interested...the page itself, if it makes any difference, will be going up later this week. The admins and I have been playing email tag trying to iron out all the details, but it's almost there.

[Bouba]

Have you done some plans for your cocoa application or you plan on doing a rewrite of an application like gerry's icq but with cocoa functionalities? It would be a nice application, the user interface of GICQ is so intuitive, it is not bloated, etc.

[tobli]

Originally posted by exrae:
<STRONG>I'd be interesting in starting (and/or working with others) to create a full and fully Cocoa client for those APIs Tobli, as long as it uses the v7 ICQ protocol of course</STRONG>

Sorry, it only supports v5 for communicating with the server. At the time when I started this project the v7 protocol (based on AIM) wasn't really documented at all. I know people have decoded more parts of it now, and published some docs, but I don't know any details. Since v7 is totally different from v5 it would take a rewrite of parts of my code to support it. I know to little about the actual structure of the protocol to give an estimate on how diffucult it would be.

[Oneota]

I have one request:

Whatever direction you guys take this, please, PLEASE add Firewall support! My campus has a firewall and it's preventing me from using ICQ completely (except for ICQ's actual client, which suck too much to use).

Thanks!

[squareman]

Originally posted by Oneota:
PLEASE add Firewall support!

I second that. Gerry had admitted that he never developed this for gICQ because he had no firewall experience.

Also, I see some people talking about Cocoa-only. I would love a Carbon-based version that is more stable than the current (current one gives me the "spinning arrows of death" all the time and often re-receives certain ICQ messages over and over again). I am still stuck in 9.2.1 land and won't be joining the X 10.1 world until I can get the cash to get a G4-based system (got a beige G3 now). A Carbon-based version would allow users to use it in whichever environment they boot into.

It would certainly make sense to do a Carbon version that worked well first so that it could be the "final" Classic-compatible version. From there, Cocoa code the sucker!

[exrae]

Ok, it seems to me that the major dilemna in this sitaation is coding a Carbon/Cocoa API or Framework that uses the ICQv7 (OSCAR) protocol. All the problems that apps like Fire are encountering (as well as other Linux/Unix based clients such as Licq, micq etc..) are because of Mirabillis' support for the v5 protocol (slowly deteriorating).

I suggest that we start/find a project that can implement this protocol well, then start to write Carbon and Cocoa apps that use it.

What do you guys think of it?

[Chris Silverberg]

Actually, Gerry's ICQ primarily uses the v4 protocol although it does some things from v5. But v4 and v5 are so similar that I don't expect that upgrading to v5 would solve any problems.... as noted, the problems that Gerry's ICQ has been having lately are shared by other ICQ clients that are strictly v5.

So, this prompts a question regarding ICQv7 (OSCAR). Is this protocol documented somewhere? I'd like to take a look at what effort is involved.

BTW, I've fixed a few bugs in Gerry's ICQ and I've been meaning to put my version online. I dont have time to commit to a SorceForge project, but I'll make available my version and changes for anyone interested... I'll try to get it online this weekend.

-Chris

[davecom]

Originally posted by exrae:
<STRONG>Ok, it seems to me that the major dilemna in this sitaation is coding a Carbon/Cocoa API or Framework that uses the ICQv7 (OSCAR) protocol. All the problems that apps like Fire are encountering (as well as other Linux/Unix based clients such as Licq, micq etc..) are because of Mirabillis' support for the v5 protocol (slowly deteriorating).

I suggest that we start/find a project that can implement this protocol well, then start to write Carbon and Cocoa apps that use it.

What do you guys think of it?</STRONG>

Seems a logical approach. If you really want to make a good client, v7 should be implemented. You don't want to carbonize Gerri's ICQ just to have a legacy carbon app.

[Drizzt]

Mirabilis as been giving a very hard time to v5 ICQ Client users recently. Server disappearing, offline messages allways coming back (I now have 15, lucky me!), stuff like that..

So I'd say, write to Mirabilis, ask for the doc, make it v7!!!

They are "supposed" to give you the info you need.

Unfortunatly, the only programming language I'm somewhat fluent with it Java.. I'm of no help

I've been removing the "unused variables" to see.. and trying to get the CSM stuff out.. but failed on the second.. ah well..

But.. it'd be nice if the app did'nt bounce, but just had something added in the icon to show that there are messages (like Mail.app)

[Code Master]

I think it's great that Gerry's is being overhauled for X. I'd love to help but I need more training.

One thing that I've noted about Gerry's in 10.1 is that it has huge memory leaks somewhere. After having it running for a day, it takes ages to do anything in it and it even slows the whole system. Quitting and reopening it fixes it all, but they shouldn't be there in the first place.

Hope to see some good builds in the near future,
Code Master

[ciphun]

i have no coding skills or developing skills, but I have been using gICQ since it was d31 and i'd be interested in helping in any way that I can, even if it means that I have to reinstall OSX on my ibook. If I can help out in any way, let me know, blizzard, i'll be emailing you soon...I am so glad that someone or some group of people have decided to pick up gerry's icq and make it the best that it can be, the best that it was supposed to be.

Thank you so very much!


ciphun

[blizzard]

Due to the nature of the page, unfortunately individual users can't upload their projects or information to the page: it all has to go through me, and then through one of the MacNN admins. So if any of you have source code, binaries, information, questions, or suggestions, please email them to me at blizzard_50@hotmail.com and I will post them on the site as soon as humanly possible. I do suffer time constraints just the same as the rest of you, however, so it may be a couple of days before I get your stuff on the site. Also, I would like to be able to properly attribute any one person's work to that person, so if they have any extra info about themselves or what they've done then I would love if they let me know in their emails. Finally, if someone is against the idea of giving me their work, then feel free to give me the link to your site and I'll post it too

Thanks for the participation, guys! I really hope we can make this work!

blizzard.

[rawhead]

Great that gICQ is coming back alive. Just one request. Please support foreign, 2-byte (specifically, for my case, Japanese) characters. That was one of the greatest thing about gICQ, the great support for 2-byte characters, even before the Mirabilis clients.

Right now, with Carbon gICQ, I can't even type anything in Japanese, let alone send it.

[bertrandl]

Was there any reason for not putting the source on sourceforge (other than nobody having time to be a maintainer?).

I mean, that would get the project a free CVS, bug tracking, feature request planner, etc.

CVS would simplify the management of patches a lot...

[amwt]

Please consider adding 2-byte character support (for chinese, japanese, korean fonts etc).

[SteveJobs]

Hi boys,
I loved GerrysICQ since i got it to know but the OS X version always sucked, it also had a lot of connection problems so i switched over to mirabilis icq, although this is ugly.

What I would love to see, would be if you could fix the connection problems, the small bugs mentioned and if you could add those cool birthday alert and Groups features of the windows version.

I also heard, that the windows client can save the contact list on the icq servers, this would be a great feature!

Steve

[Edgar]

Well, I've fixed a few more bugs in the Carbon version of Gerry's ICQ (for more info see the Release Notes.)
The app and source can be found on my idisk.
Blizzard feel free to put them on the site, would it be better if I sent the files to you next time?

Unfortunately it sounds like gICQ is doomed without v7 support, So I'm wondering if there's much point putting any more effort into carbon gICQ.

-Edgar

[tobli]

Originally posted by rawhead:
<STRONG>Great that gICQ is coming back alive. Just one request. Please support foreign, 2-byte (specifically, for my case, Japanese) characters. That was one of the greatest thing about gICQ, the great support for 2-byte characters, even before the Mirabilis clients.

Right now, with Carbon gICQ, I can't even type anything in Japanese, let alone send it.</STRONG>

There is no specific support for 2-byte languages in icq or gicq. One wishes that they'd use Unicode, but messages in icq are sent in the standard windows encoding. I have no idea how the official clients handles multi-byte languages, but there's no hint (at least not in packets sent through the server) on how (in what encoding) a given messages should be interpretated. Since I have never seen multibyte messages in an official client I'm only guessing, so someone with first hand experience feel free to set me straight. My guess is that you have to explicitly choose a Japanese font for a given user to force the byte stream to be interpretated as Japanese, if you expect that user to send messages in Japanese. As I said I haven't seen this first hand, but I know one thing for sure, there's nothing in gerry's icq library specific to multi-byte messages.