Fire is the first instant messenger client for Mac OS X (previously for OPENSTEP), that can access IRC, Jabber, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and Apple Bonjour. All services are built off of GPL’d libraries, including firetalk, libfaim, libicq2000, libmsn, jabber, and libyahoo2. An instant messenger is a computer application which allows instant text communication between two or more people through a network such as the Internet. ... Mac OS X is the latest version of the Mac OS, the operating system software for Macintosh computers. ... OpenStep is an open object-oriented API specification for an object-oriented operating system that uses any modern operating system as its core, principly developed by NeXT. It is important to recognize that while OpenStep is an API specification, OPENSTEP (all capitalized) is a specific implementation of this OpenStep developed... Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. ... Jabber is an open, XML-based protocol for instant messaging and presence. ... The AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is an ad-supported instant messaging computer program, published by AOL, which uses the OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol. ... ICQ is the first instant messaging computer program created by start-up Israeli company Mirabilis and first released in November, 1996. ... The . ... Categories: Computer stubs | Mac OS instant messengers | Windows instant messengers | Yahoo! ... Bonjour, formerly Rendezvous, is Apples trade name for its implementation of the IETF Zeroconf protocol - a computer network technology used in Apples Mac OS X from version 10. ...

Fire is released under the GNU General Public License, the most recent (as of January 4, 2005) is 1.5. The GNU logo The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project (a project to create a complete free software operating system). ... January 4 is the 4th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

How it all Began

Back in the early beta days of Mac OS X, Eric Peyton wanted to have an IM client which would run on this new OS from Apple. Of course, all of the official client vendors had not done anything to support Mac OS X, so Eric started expanding on an OpenStep project he had been working on, which used an open source library to connect with AIM servers. He started porting this using the new Cocoa libraries on OS X and a new IM client began to take shape. Mac OS X is the latest version of the Mac OS, the operating system software for Macintosh computers. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... Mac OS X is the latest version of the Mac OS, the operating system software for Macintosh computers. ... OpenStep is an open object-oriented API specification for an object-oriented operating system that uses any modern operating system as its core, principly developed by NeXT. It is important to recognize that while OpenStep is an API specification, OPENSTEP (all capitalized) is a specific implementation of this OpenStep developed... The AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is an ad-supported instant messaging computer program, published by AOL, which uses the OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol. ... A Cocoa application being developed using Xcode. ...

The One Man Show

Development in those early days was fast and furious, and Fire was touted by Apple as one of the keystone applications on Mac OS X 10.0. Initially Eric hosted the application and did all the development on his own equipment. He formed the corporation "Epicware" (http://www.epicware.com) to protect himself from the lawyers of the huge corporations he was interacting with. Apple Computer, Inc. ... Mac OS X 10. ...

The application was expanded to include the ability to talk to multiple servers. First Yahoo! Messenger and ICQ were added, followed later by IRC, MSN, and Jabber. Most recently, support for Apple Bonjour was added. Categories: Computer stubs | Mac OS instant messengers | Windows instant messengers | Yahoo! ... ICQ is the first instant messaging computer program created by start-up Israeli company Mirabilis and first released in November, 1996. ... Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. ... The . ... Jabber is an open, XML-based protocol for instant messaging and presence. ... Bonjour, formerly Rendezvous, is Apples trade name for its implementation of the IETF Zeroconf protocol - a computer network technology used in Apples Mac OS X from version 10. ...

Getting Some Help

In 2001, Colter Reed started contributing to the development of Fire on a regular basis, and became the second major developer of Fire. They collaborated for a while using the Epicware (http://www.epicware.com) hardware, and finally decided to move the project to sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net) to take advantage of the free hosting, download, and mirror services available there. Version 0.28.a was the first release which used the SourceForge System.

See also

• List of instant messengers
• Comparison of instant messengers

The following is a list of instant messengers. ... The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of instant messengers. ...

External link

• Official Website (http://fire.sourceforge.net)
• Fire's Public Forums (http://fire.sourceforge.net/forums)