Introducing ScuttleButt

won the grand prize (Rank #1) at two international level competitons; AIR-O-MANIA, TechFest, IIT-B during Jan 22-24 and at GumboRumble, IT-BHU. Both these events were industrial defined problems sponsored by Adobe Inc., to foster engineering talent and creativity among student developers in India on its recently launched Adobe AIR platform. The prize money was enough for me to buy me a brand new concert flute (boy they are costly :) and give treat to my friends.

Scuttlebutt |ˈskətlˌbət| noun
rumor; gossip: the scuttlebutt has it that he was a spy. Source: Oxford Dictionary

ScuttleButt is targeted at gamers, students, professionals and the those user groups which are connected to peers via the ubiquitous local area network aka LAN.

The LAN provides a swift medium of information exchange and present solutions fail to automate all those things on LAN that a IM does, such as file transfer, voice and video chat. I’m a computer science and engineering student and I live in a hostel with more than 300 students and we are all connected to each other by the local area network and sometimes the Internet is cut. Moreover, my friends and I are fed up with the pop-up windows of IPMsg. So, during my winter break, I started working on developing a cross-platform communication tool.

Hence, ScuttleButt was made that just works out of the box!

The great thing about ScuttleButt is that it’s a server-less messenger with features such as click n run, automated peer discovery, encoded avatars, status messages, notifications, p2p chatting, group chatting, file transfer and voice chatting! Though some of the features are under development, it just works out of the box. You get the air file (now that code is open sourc’d one can download and build), install it and click to open and that’s it!!! Download the source archive.

April 1, 2010

Introducing ScuttleButt Instant Messenger for LAN