Miranda IM

Miranda Instant Messenger is the IM software I use. I like it for quite a few reasons:

1. It connects to almost any protocol there is.
2. It has a small footprint, both on your computer’s hard drive and in its memory.
3. It is extensible, in the sense that its architecture is plugin-based, which lets you extend the program in many ways, and even replace “built-in” functionality with your own.

People have done wonderful and unexpected things with this program, as you can see by browsing Miranda IM’s plugin database.

I started using Miranda IM when I started working for Motorola. At the time, the firewall only allowed the official Yahoo! Messenger client to go through (as it falls back to HTTP when direct connection cannot be established with Yahoo!’s servers). So I decided to write the Relay Plugin for Miranda, which uses Miranda’s multi-protocol capabilities to act as a relay between protocols. Something like this:

The Relay plugin also motivated other people to create relay-like plugins, like mBot Relay agent plugin, forward plugin and yaRelay plugin. This actually makes me kind of proud.

I think this plugin is great, but it is now outdated since the intoduction of the Miranda scripting plugin, which spawned the creation of Web Miranda (also a plugin) and now you basically can have Miranda working from anywhere in the world using nothing but a web browser.

I continued to develop for Miranda, though. After experimenting with TAPI3, I put Caller ID into a plugin and created the Caller ID plugin. The cool thing about this plugin is that it uses my own Relay plugin to tell me when someone calls in. So when I’m at work and someone calls my apartment, my computer at home IMs me about it with the number. A neat trick to show your geek friends, that’s for sure.