We’ve had a fairly active IRC chatroom for SproutCore for awhile (#sproutcore on irc.freenode.net).

IRC doesn’t work for everyone though, so we’re trying a new kind of chat room as well.  SproutCore now has a Jabber Chat Room available at sproutcore@conference.jabber.org

Jabber Chat Rooms work just like IRC but you can access them directly from most modern IM clients including iChat, Adium, and Google Talk instead of using a special client.  They also are less likely to be blocked by your corporate firewall.

To access the chat room, you need a Jabber account.  If you have a Gmail account, you can use that.  Just follow the link below to setup your favorite client:

Google Talk with other clients

Once you have added a Jabber account to your client, just find the “Join Chat Room” menu option (usually under “File”) and enter “sproutcore@conference.jabber.org”.  Click the “autoadd” button if there is one to automatically join the room in the future.

That’s it.  Your setup.  You can now chat with anyone else who joins the room.

To be clear, this chat room does not replace the #sproutcore IRC channel.

Jabber offers some compelling advantages over IRC.  On the other hand, more people are used to IRC and not Jabber.  So we’re going to just try it out for awhile.  It doesn’t cost anything to run both rooms; you can choose whichever you prefer to use.

I’ve setup my IM client to autojoin this room so if have a Jabber client, pop in to say hi!

**UPDATE: **Meebo supports Jabber Chat Rooms also.  Get live help with your SproutCore projects from any browser. :-)