Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? I sure hope so, because I’ve been very flattering to iChat. First, some background: back in the spring of 2001, Greg Parker and I wrote a Mac client for the Zephyr Notification Service (a Unix-based messaging system developed at MIT and used at, among other places, Stanford) for our senior project. For a couple of months now, I’ve been toying with the idea of porting it to Mac OS X and getting it into shape for public release. The original was written using PowerPlant, but I never could get recent versions of CodeWarrior to compile the thing, so I scrapped the user interface and rewrote it using Cocoa. Now instead of looking like a halfway-decent AOL Instant Messenger clone, it looks like a bad iChat clone. I’d appreciate user interface feedback, by the way.

The SourceForge site docs tell you to “release early, release often,” so I guess I should do that. I’ve haven’t written any documentation yet, but if you’re at a site that uses Zephyr with Kerberos authentication, and have Mac OS X 10.2 or later, go ahead and give zChat 0.1 a try. If you’re at Stanford and want to say hi, I’m akosut.