GYach Enhanced 1.0.7

Gyach Enhanced (Gyach-E) and pY! Voice Chat. Gyach Enhanced is currently the most feature-rich Yahoo! client for Linux operating systems.

It is an unofficial fork of the original Gyach, and supports almost all of the features you would expect to find on the official Windows Yahoo! client: Voice chat, webcams, faders, nicknames, audibles, avatars, display images, and more.

Yet, it remains very light-weight and memory-friendly. Gyach Enhanced, pY! Voice Chat, and the Gyach-E Webcam Utilities all use Gtk-2 for their user interfaces (Gtk-2 2.0.6 or better required).

Gyach Enhanced is intended to be a deliberate departure from the growing trend of multi-protocol/multi-platform messaging and chat clients which often suffer from half-baked or non-existent support for major features such as voice, webcams, privacy, security, and spam control, and generally offer slower adoption of new protocol features that Windows users have access to almost immediately with each new Y! Messenger release. Gyach Enhanced is never intended to be a multi-protocol application (i.e., not intended for connecting to MSN, AIM, etc.) as I would rather use a client that handles one messaging system and handles it well, than a client that handles only the basics on several systems.

Gyach-E is about PROGRESS: Being among the first, not the last, to implement support for new features. Lately, Gyach Enhanced has been adopting new features at an alarming rate, as the development has not been bogged down with a need to rewrite/recompile code for Windows and other operating systems or a need to delay the addition of new features for fear of its affects on other protocols plugins. In other words: New features are added quickly because I do not have to worry if something will work on Windows or if the new addition will break MSN support...Gyach Enhanced just worries about Yahoo! on Linux: Thats it. "One protocol, one OS...done well.". Gyach Enhanced is also the first Yahoo application for Linux with support for the vast majority of the new features added to the Windows Y! Messenger 6: Display Images in the PM window, Avatars, Audibles, and Stealth Settings.

While other applications prefer to focus on things such as themeable smileys...Gyach Enhanced is focused on USEFUL features such as webcam support, voice chat, controlling spam (about 75-95% effective), and doing the best it can to prevent you from being booted, bombed, flooded, and stalked. Gyach-E is known to survive tons of different boot codes and is constantly being patched to defend against new ones as I find out about them. For example, when support for Audibles was added to Gyach-E, I also anticipated that people would eventually start using Audibles to flood people and send Audible spam, so I also implemented measures to help defend against these types of abuse.

This is part of the concept behind Gyach-E: Allow the user to enjoy the latest features while containing and minimizing any damage that can be caused by people abusing the new features. The program responds intelligently to boot attacks by temporarily shutting down sound events and dialog boxes to avoid X and sound card-related crashes, controlling the flow of incoming network packets, minimizing CPU usage during an attack, auto-ignoring users as necessary, monitoring and logging suspcious events, and sometimes, even booting the bot/person thats trying to boot you.

Together with pY! Voice Chat, the Gyach-E Webcam utilities, and a few light-weight plugins (including encryption support), Gyach Enhanced is the most advanced, feature-rich Linux client for Yahoo! thus far. It is the first (and, to my knowledge, the ONLY) Linux Y! client that supports both voice chat and webcams (sending and receiving.)