KMess 2.0 progress, personal stuff

With this blog entry I'd like to inform you all about the amazing progress we're making with KMess 2.0. It's been a bit quiet on the blogging side, but development surely didn't stop. The development timeline at trac.kmess.org reveals there are 200 commits within the last 30 days.

Within a few days we hope to release a 2.0-alpha 2 release, which has the following new features:

• Everything is running quite stable under KDE 4.
• Tabbed chats are supported now. This is such a breeze, I wouldn't ever want to live without that anymore!
• Every dialog received a nice makeover.
• Connecting over HTTP is supported, making KMess usable for restricted LAN's.
• Ink sending works!
• Larger messages can be sent
• MSNplus formatting can be displayed.
• We've added an application-wide settings dialog for common settings.
• Lots of nifty improvements everywhere; choose your fire transfer ports, automatically download to a folder, copy contact 'now listening' information, etc..

We stil have our share of things we like to improve, implement and annoyances to fix, so the upcoming release will still be called an alpha. Most of the work on KMess 2 has been done by Valerio and Antonio, so I like to thank them for this as well!

This is how KMess 2 look like now:

In the screenshot you see the ink receiving and tabbed chat in action.

KMess on Windows

There is experimental support for Windows as well:

There is no "setup.exe" yet to double-click on, but a lengthy manual of steps to install. Hence the reason we still call it experimental. Everything seams to work though.

Personal stuff

I didn't always find time to work on KMess in the past few months. If you have a daily job as web developer, not all evenings are easily spent on coding as well. I still do a lot of things in the background, and I'm slowly starting to pick up coding again. I'm working through the first parts to receive webcam sessions, and you can expect this to be present in KMess too.

After the summer holidays I'll also be moving to to my very own appartment (maisonette actually). It has a small balcony, 3 bedrooms and a view to a lovely park in front, which I really love. Some work needs to be done before I can move in, like installing new kitchen and installing central heating. Guess you'll know what I'll be doing this autumn.

Oh and:

So if you see a guy coding for KMess on a white MacBook running KDE on Windows, it's probably me It's my first time on Akademy and I didn't make any plans yet, but love to join some BoF meetings and discuss innovation. Last time I checked, almost every pillar of KDE could find a place within KMess.