Gfire was started back in 2005, by Asraniel. The first release was out in May 2005. Development move quality with several new releases out in the space of a few months. These inital releases created the core code which allowed the Xfire network to be used in the Pidgin IM client. Basic friends list and messaging support was available in these first releases.
Asraniel’s last release was 0.6.0, released in September 2006. The project went in-active for 2 years, until March 2008. Asraniel made an announcement on the Gfire website that he will be leaving the project and asking for anyone to carry it on. Chewit and Luxus replied to the announcement, and began working on the project from March. Within a few weeks, development of Gfire 0.7.0, was well under way. A new website, forums and IRC channel were setup as well, which quickly re-established a Gfire community in a matter of weeks. By May 2008, Gfire 0.7.0 was out, the first Gfire release in 2 years!
2009 was an important year for the project. The community was quickly expanding, with the help of active forums, a new wiki to help the community in getting involved with development, as well as monthly IRC meetings. The team doubled in size in 2009, with two new members, oGGy and Warren, who joined the project to help with development. 2009, was the year of Gfire’s biggest release until then, Gfire 0.8.0, which included Group Chat, ‘Get Info’ support, a new Game Manager, Send typing notification, Improvements to ‘About’ window and Blocking.
The later part of 2009 and first half of 2010 has been all about heavy development of Gfire 0.9.0. This release was our biggest so far, with features such as server detection, Clan/Guild Chat, a complete code rewrite to fix stability issues, improvements to ‘Get Info’, support for P2P messaging, file transfers and game detection.
Milestones
- 2008, Start of Gfire Community
- April 2009, Reached 260th place on SourceForge Rankings, our highest so far.
- July 2009, 100,000 Downloads!
- October 2009, Gfire finally made it into the Ubuntu repos
