[NTLK] Chat Buddy, Newton IM and NewtJabber

I did some testing to day with Chat Buddy, NewtonIM and NewtJabber.
Revealing some interesting things regarding these three programs.

First is Chat Buddy. And while it DOES work, not with all servers. I
am not sure why. I ran into a few servers where it says the DNS could
not be found. However it is the same address I used on my desktop and
that worked fine. It is possible that the problem is due to IDENT or
how some servers check to see if you are a person or a bot (sending a
message and if your client responds to it a certain way then you are
kicked off the server). Again not sure what the issue is here but there
were several servers I could connect to without problems.

NewtonIM also works. It is not the fastest client you could use if your
buddy list is long and you view offline buddies (I have a long list and
most of them are not online so it was slow scrolling unless I only
viewed online buddies). This program uses the open Jabber protocol. So
to get it to work with say the AIM network you need to find a server
that has what is called a "transport". Basically what happens is you
send a message to someone on the AIM network which is first sent to the
Jabber server you are connected to, then it is forwarded (transported)
to AIM. Some Jabber servers have a lot of transports, and then others
may only have one or two. The server I used is at http://www.tipic.com.
 To get NewtonIM to work with a transport you first create a account at
tipic.com and then use another Jabber client to log into your account to
add "transports" by viewing services then adding which one(s) you want
to your "roster" (contact/buddy list) and giving it your
username/password for that transport.

After this is done you can logout of the desktop client and log in with
the jabber server you want to use. For the desktop logging in and
adding of transports I used http://psi-im.org/download which is open
source and available in with Windows, Mac and various Linux flavors.

Now as for NewtJabber, this is a NewtBasic package that predates
NewtonIM by quite a bit. It is the first Jabber package I used years
ago on my Newton. Sadly I couldn't get it to work today. But I must
admit that NewtonIM is a much better package in many respects. The
obvious one is it takes less storage space. Being a NBasic app it
requires the Nbasic runtime which takes up space, and the NewtJabber
package itself is not a lightweight. NewtonIM is FAR smaller and easier
to use. But if either package worked you would still need to "setup" a
account beforehand with a desktop client.

So the good news is there are two chat packages that still do work on
our Newts. The downside is that you won't want to use them for long
term chatting (at least not without a keyboard). But to keep in contact
anywhere, they are certainly handy. The only problem I had with using
NewtonIM is its lack of being able to look up someones information or
profile. This would be very very handy if you are using say the ICQ
transport where everyone just has numbers instead of names. Without
this you are left scratching your head as to who is who. Though you can
get around this by writing down their ICQ number and name, but is
certainly not as convenient as pulling up their profile. I wish
NewtonIM at least had the ability to make a note about a contact/buddy
and have the option of displaying that instead of their ICQ number. But
perhaps this would slow it down too much to be useful. Regardless
though NewtonIM does work and is a handy package to have on hand if you
do a lot of IMing and want to keep in touch no matter where you are.

-Dan

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