Sometime in the fall of 2002, I started working on a Perl instant messaging client called milkbone. You might have heard me mention it around here. At this point, it's working fairly well. You can use its graphical Tk interface to log onto the AIM network, get a buddy list, have conversations, check profiles, manage your buddies, set your profile and away message, and a few other things. You can also use the included extensions to do things like put the name and artist of the song XMMS or Winamp is playing into your profile or away message, to automatically counterattack anyone who warns you, to log your conversations, and to play sounds when certain events occur. Milkbone runs on Win32 and *NIX systems and is fully GPL'd. And the neatest part is: the whole thing is written in Perl.

The reason I'm posting this is that the project has started to stagnate. The last official release was last August (v0.361), at which point I started a rewrite that has slowly progressed over the past few months. The current CVS snapshot of milkbone is mostly working, but the rewrite is not quite complete. A lot of the code is a mess, as portions of it were written in 2002, while I was still very new to Perl, and the rest was tacked on recently.

In short, Milkbone needs help. Our domain name is expired, but you can get the CVS snapshot here. Try it out and take a look at the code. I'm open to suggestions, bug reports, patches, refactorings, whatever. The project really needs your help. (We're also looking for a better name - any suggestions?)

Also, if you want to contribute in another way, financial assistance would be greatly appreciated. Even a couple of dollars to my PayPal account (username = paypal@batkins.com) would help tons. I need money to renew my domain name and hosting.

If you need to contact me, PM me or contact me via AIM on screen name althor57.

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