It looks like Pidgin is going to be getting two of the features that users often ask for, and I personally am pretty happy about these features as well. The Google Summer of Code project pairs college students with open source projects and Google pays them for working with the project, and some very interesting things result.
The first project which caught my eye was the Theme Improvements project. This project basically aims to give Pidgin theming capabilities, which will be awesome and I hope this works out. Many people use bloated clients like Trillian because of its theme support, so I hope this attracts many new users in this way.
Another guy is working on finally adding Voice and Video support for XMPP to Pidgin. This is probably the biggest project for Pidgin currently, because going from strictly text chat to voice and video is a hue leap, and I hope this project works out as well.
It seems like a lot of people currently love to bash the Pidgin developers for not working on features they wouldn’t use and have no time to implement, so it’s great to see that students who do have the time and motivation to do these things are getting them done, because it’s not fair to expect the developers to work on whatever users want if they don’t use those features themselves. The beauty of open source is that people have the ability to add features they want, but it seems like a lot of the more vocal Pidgin users don’t believe this at all.
Finally, another guy, completely unrelated to the GSoC program, is working on adding a Facebook chat protocol plugin to Pidgin, which is awesome. Currently it can only send messages but not receive them, and it seemed like my friends would log in and out every few seconds, but once it works it would be great.
ibrahim's blog 