New Mail.Ru Agent for Mac OS X released

Good afternoon, dear habrakrady!

Today I am pleased to present to you (on behalf of the whole team) a new version of the Agent for [Mac] OS X! And this is not just a release of bug fixes and minor improvements (of which there are actually quite a few), there are some really big new features in the new version.

More than a year has passed since the last publication about the Agent for Mac, since then another major version has been released, which included support for ICQ and other improvements.
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By the way, at the end of the article there are some technical details and other things.

The main mega-feature: video and audio calls now in the version for Mac! You can easily call the other party, even if that Agent for Windows. Calls are implemented on the basis of WebRTC with various improvements that have already been written on Habré. Yes, the VoIP engine is now cross-platform, and has already been ported to iOS and Android, and it has also been greatly improved. Video and audio show very good quality. A separate team is working on this engine, and I take this opportunity to say hello to them. =)

Yes, the current implementation of calls is far from ideal, but after all, Moscow was not built right away, we are working to improve the Agent tirelessly. We generally work a lot on what, but I will tell you about this some other time.



Feature number two: the ability to enable single-window interface. Yes, we are in trend. =)

This feature is available from the settings and is disabled by default. Not everyone likes such trends, although I, for example, am very happy with this feature, were badly lacking.



Well, the feature-appendage: support for Notification Center in OS X 10.8.0+, now Growl is not the only option for notifications. Growl will be involved in younger versions of the system. And since not everyone likes Notification Center, in 10.8 you can also configure it without problems.


In the order of things: a general improvement in stability, the correction of numerous bugs, some improvements in the interface.

And, of course, the same old : instant messenger, microblogging, mail notifications, free SMS , connection of several accounts of the Agent and ICQ! And all this works in Mac OS X since version 10.6, which is still quite popular. Unfortunately, the Agent does not work on 32-bit Macs, but this is also fixable.


You can download it on the official website of the project agent.mail.ru or in the AppStore .

Now some technical information and plans for the future. The Mac agent is currently being developed by a team of three Objective-C / C ++ developers and one trainee (Lesha, hello!). Separately, there are several people developing a VoIP library, I already wrote about them above.

It is worth mentioning that the project was previously completely outsourced, but now, finally, the development has moved completely to the Moscow office. The code that came from the outsourcers, as expected, was the classic “new arrival code from the outsourcers ” ™, it contained three products in one project: Agent for iOS, Agent for Mac OS X and Mail for iOS. Of course, these products were "unzipped" and transferred into the hands of different people. Much has been rewritten from scratch, much is still being rewritten.

Actually, now there is an active processing of the system core (the protocol part), gradually it is planned to switch completely to the new core (it, like the old one, is written in C ++, but more homogeneous, logical and stable), it is also written by some people (hi JasF , hello bronenos !), although the teams are both intertwined and share tasks sometimes quite bizarrely. This new kernel was originally written for the iOS-Agent, but in the end it will be the same for all versions, ports on Windows, Android, Bada, etc. are being prepared. Now it includes protocols for the Agent and ICQ, but others will be added later.

But not only the protocol part was very bad in the old project. GUI was no better. Objective-C ++ was widely used, programming ideas were used, well suited for C ++, but not working well for Objective-C, in many places you could find things like std::vector delegates; and other pearls. And it was a difficult decision: to rewrite the entire GUI almost completely from scratch, taking into account the peculiarities of the new kernel, but abstracting it to the maximum. So in a short time we are all waiting for a fully regenerated and transformed Agent! But no one cancels the support of the old, the bugfixes in the current release will be made (and are already being done) regularly.

Thank you for your attention, you had the Agent and ICQ development team for [Mac] OS X: silvansky , AlexChernyy and SClown .