Screenshots

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.

A while ago I mentioned briefly KMess would be ported to KDE 4. We weren't sure when to do it yet. Eventually we decided to port it as soon as possible before doing new changes to the codebase. That would only make the porting more difficult, or give SVN a vague status to new contributions. So at 15 January I started a branch for porting the code.

After all automated changes we went through all files one by one (resuling in ~190 commits) before things managed to compile again. For those that are interested, there is a screenshot of the first run. Things crashed at startup, crashed deep in QHttp, froze, and corrupted memory multiple times. Once you manage to open the settings panel again things look really funny.

We've managed to get these issues fixed in the last 2 weeks and things are starting to get back in shape. This is KMess after ~270 commits since the initial start of the 'kde4porting' branch:

Login dialog		Full desktop

Note that the application is still not usable. Now we've gotten past most crashes we can fix everything we've broken and make it pretty. Some things were broken on purpose to get past all compiling errors, like the contact list, now playing information and saving of settings. In fact, your settings will likely be eaten at this point.

There are some visible benefits for the KDE 4 porting already. Oxygen alone makes apps breathtaking beautiful. The networking code has less dependencies on KDE now, which helps to build a library from it later. The application startups almost instantly. Memory statistics also show some interesting effects (note the size is also affected by the shared libraries).

I'm not really sure what those numbers mean, but for the ignorant among us it makes KDE 4 applications look so much better.

There are some additional improvements to the file transfer previews. The previews are now generated with a more low-level KIO API. This no longer blocks the KMess interface to generate the preview.

As extra bonus, KMess generates previews of video files as well. When you send a movie to someone who uses the official client, they'll see something like this:


Pretty neat, isn't it?

KMess just got a new cool feature! I've received a patch for file transfer previews. The result now looks like this:

In the official client this is used to send previews of images. KMess also adds support for almost every imaginable file type, thanksverymuch KDE! Think PDF, OpenDocument, HTML, Qt designer files, really everything. Whooho!

I've just completed the now listening support in KMess! A month ago KMess could only show what contacts are listening to. Now it also does the reverse; notifying contacts what you're listening to.

When this feature is active, an additional status line appears in the main window:

KMess is able to retreive playing information from Amarok, Juk, Kaffeine, KsCD, and Noatun. Suport for non KDE-players like XMMS and Banchee could be added later, but I'm not starting with it yet. Each of these players has it's own way to provide the playing information.

To enable this feature, check the last option in the settings dialog:

KMess uses DCOP to retreive the playing information. DCOP is a really nice KDE feature to make IPC-calls to other applications (it runs over the standard X11 ICE protocol). Try the following commands in the console, and you'll get the idea:

dcop
dcop amarok
dcop amarok player
dcop amarok player artist

Really amazing, and extremely powerful

A recent enhancement in KMess is support for "now listening" information. You get to see what your contacts are playing. this information is displayed after the personal status message, and looks like this:

Much like the official client, you get small icon, and the title afterwards.

The next step is offcourse, displaying what you're playing. Work has started, and I've decided to use Kopete's "now listening" plugin as inspiration. It has support for Amarok, Kaffeine, Juk, KsCD, Noatun and XMMS. Sounds good enough to me