Wippien

Wippien is an open-source VPN service that can be used in the gaming community or for file sharing purposes. It is able to establish P2P (peer to peer) connections between users in order to access shares, printers and services.

Aside from P2P capabilities, the tool works as an instant messaging client that comes with support for different protocols, such as ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, and Google Talk.

In order to make use of the app’s features, you need to configure a Jabber account. This step can be accomplished by providing details about the Jabber ID, password, resource, server, and port number.

Instead of a Jabber ID, you can use a Gmail account. You can also test the configured account in order to verify if the connection is successful.

Although at the core of its functionality Wippien is designed as a VPN client, it looks like an instant messaging program. You can check out a list with your contacts and configure your status to Online, Away, Free for Chat, Invisible or other predefined options.

The tool lets you modify your avatar image by choosing between several preset photos or adding one from your personal collection (e.g. JPG, BMP, PNG).

You are allowed to add contacts in order to share your VPN or remove them, add users from other services like AIM or MSN, browse or create chat rooms, mute sound, and toggle the voice chat.

Some of the aforementioned features are easy to reach because they are integrated in the main window. In case you are looking for detailed customization options, the ‘Options’ panel provides the answer to your questions.

You can give information about your home and work addresses, automatically hide Wippien when it’s inactive for certain time, set up a master password, specify log paths, show message history and include timestamp, and configure sounds to be played on various events.

What’s more, Wippien lets you automatically display the Away message based on system inactivity, change the looks of the utility using different skins, automatically establish VPN connection at startup, allow or block network traffic, and enter the maximum transfer unit.

Wippien is not the most powerful VPN service on the market but it provides a simple way for establishing direct links between computers and chatting on the Internet. If you intend to use it only for communicating and playing games with friends, it may be just enough. However, you should know that some of the program’s features need further improvements as they are quite buggy. For example, the chat room is still under development and you may experience some issues related to IM services.