Fire is an

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...

for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

(previously for

OPENSTEP OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep was ...

), that can access

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and ...

XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), it ...

, AIM, ICQ,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

, and

Bonjour Bonjour is a French word meaning (literally translated) "good day", and is commonly used as a greeting. Bonjour may also refer to: People * Laurence BonJour (born 1943), epistemologist and professor of philosophy at the University of Washington ...

. All services are built on GPL’d libraries, includin
firetalk
libfaim, libmsn,

, and libyahoo2. Fire supports OS X v10.1 and higher. The latest version of Fire is 1.5.6. The program is released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

. On 23 February 2007, it was announced that there would be no future versions of Fire released. The official Fire website stated there were several reasons, the biggest being the loss of developers, followed by the fact that most of the libraries used by Fire are no longer in active development. Two of Fire's developers joined the

Adium Adium is a free and open source instant messaging client for macOS that supports multiple IM networks, including Google Talk and XMPP. In the past, it has also supported AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. Adium is written usi ...

team and wrote a transition path for users to move from Fire to Adium. The announcement recommended Adium for future IM needs.

History

In the early

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

of Mac OS X, Eric Peyton wanted to have an IM client which would run on this new OS. However, all of the official client vendors had not yet supported Mac OS X, so Peyton 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 Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...

libraries on Mac OS X and a new IM client began to take shape. Early development was fast and Fire was touted by Apple as one of the keystone applications on

Mac OS X v10.0 Mac OS X 10.0 (code named Cheetah) is the first major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It was released on March 24, 2001 for a price of $129 after a public beta. Mac OS X was Apple's long-awaited successor to ...

. Initially Peyton hosted the application and did all the development on his own equipment. He then formed the corporatio
"Epicware"
to protect himself from the lawyers of the huge corporations he was interacting with. The application was expanded to include the ability to talk to multiple servers. First

and ICQ were added, followed later by

, and

. Most recently, support for

was added. Because service providers at this time used proprietary protocols to facilitate vendor lock in, Fire would often stop working with one or another major service until the application or one of its component libraries was updated. 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 still using the Epicware hardware and finally decided to move the project to

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

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. From 2003 to 2007, primary development of the Fire application was transferred to Graham Booker and Alan Humpherys with many others participating in development and localization of the product. On 23 February 2007, development of Fire officially ended as the Fire developers merged with he Adium development team to focus on a single IM application supporting Mac OS X.

Creation

Firetalk was created in 1997 by Multitude Communications in South San Francisco. The product, Firetalk, had its birth in a program that Multitude created called FireTeam. FireTeam was a multi-user game played over the internet. The game received good reviews, with the most favorable review highlighting the VoIP feature that FireTeam used so that users could communicate and plan over the internet. It was at that time that Multitude decided to branch off and create a program strictly for VoIP called Firetalk and Multitude adopted a "DBA" as Firetalk.

References

External links

*
Fire's Public ForumsMacWorld review
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fire Free instant messaging clients Free Internet Relay Chat clients MacOS Internet Relay Chat clients Free XMPP clients AIM (software) clients MacOS instant messaging clients Yahoo! instant messaging clients Discontinued software Software that uses GNUstep

History

Creation

See also

References

External links