Marty's typepad

KDE Telepathy 0.1 released! Part 1 of 5 - Contact List

Oh yes, it finally happened. We killed all those blocking bugs and present you the shiny new IM solution for your desktop. It consits of several (independent) components, each simply replacable with different one (for example you can use our contact list and Empathy's chat window or vice-versa). Currently it is in "Technical Preview" stage, it's not feature complete and probably full of bugs.

In this post I want to introduce you one of our main components - Contact List. It is exactly what you would expect, a list of your contacts :) It has two possible views, one more compact and one bigger with available actions showing on mouse hover.

The actions overlay shows only those actions, for which you have available support and/or the other side has support. That means if the other side can't make audio calls, you won't see the action to start a call. They are similarilly disabled in the context menu.

In the context menu above, you can see entries like "Move to Group" and "Show Info...". Our super-shiny-cool contact list supports cross-accounts groups, which means that if you have a group with the same name in two accounts, they are showed as one. We have also infrastructure that supports contacts to be in multiple groups, but this hasn't been implemented yet.

Side by side with with contact tooltips, which show various info (currently only avatar, name, IM id and presence status with message), we also have a bigger info dialog, which we'll further expand in the upcoming releases.

We currently do not support saving presence messages, so when you reopen your contact list, you have to set a new one. However we do support setting a global presence message (you can set that on the top where it says "Set your status message here...") and then a special presence per account (this one you can set after expanding the account menu). Setting and saving your presence messages will be greatly improved in upcoming releases as well.

And now shortly for the rest of the features. You can add new contacts to your account, that's what the first button in the toolbar is for. The second one then switches between views, one displays all your groups, the other one then your accounts (and no groups). The third button simply shows or hides offline users (and empty groups). Fourth toolbar button is for sorting contacts by presence (ie. online first) and alphabetically, if disabled, contacts are sorted alphabetically only. The icon with binoculars is for searching your contact list. You press it, an input box pops up in the bottom and you can start typing the name you're looking for. And finally, the last button, hides some settings, like account configuration, list type (compact or full) and currently also the "Join chat room" button is there (as we simply didn't have any better place for it :P).

So that's our great contact list. If you have ideas, wishes or you have found some bugs, just storm our mailing list kde-telepathy (at) kde.org or our irc channel #kde-telepathy, leave a bug/wish on bugs.kde.org or leave a comment down below (sorry for the need to log-in, typepad limitation, but it takes OpenID too). We encourage you to test it out, because without testers out there we won't know what to improve, what to focus on. After all, we're doing it for you :) 

I should also state, that this work is being done as part of my diploma thesis for the Czech branch of Red Hat, so if you think it's cool, don't forget to say something good about Red Hat here and there ;)

More components introduction will follow (on different blogs, all aggregated on planet.kde.org) and I'll put the links here as they are out.

GSoC: PIM, Nepomuk and Telepathy

So I've made it into GSoC this year and I'm very grateful to all those who put faith in my project proposal. For those not yet familiar with it, let me introduce it to you.

Nepomuk is being used more and more by applications and is becoming a corner stone of KDE. Simply speaking, Nepomuk is an independent storage service, where any application can save its data and any other app can access any data stored there. All data are "standardized" by ontologies - basically a dictionary with set of rules and relationships. So if one application stores for example emails into Nepomuk, another application can access all emails using an Email ontology. 

That's where Akonadi comes into play. Akonadi is a central storage service for PIM applications. It stores and manages your emails, contacts, calendar events etc. These are very important and useful data and it's highly desirable to make use of them in other parts of the system. Thus they are feeded into Nepomuk, which then serves as a point of entry for getting PIM data from another applications. Of course you could use Akonadi directly in your application, but since Nepomuk is becoming the "inter-app-storage-component" and it basically tries to model real world, it's a logical step to put them there.

Once the data are stored in Nepomuk, any application can make use of them. For example Telepathy, the IM framework - in your contact list you have bunch of people, with whom you can chat, send them files or make a video call. But we can also load PIM data for your contacts from Nepomuk and extend the capabilities to sending emails, creating a calendar appointment or whatever you imagine. And conversly, if we feed Telepathy data into Nepomuk, PIM can grab these data and show you presence status of your contacts in addressbook or in KMail.

All in all, you'll get a truly integrated desktop.

But the road there is still a bit long. Akonadi currently feeds into Nepomuk only raw contacts themselves - NCO:PersonContact in ontology language. Which is ok, but it misses something. NCO:PersonContact is just an information entity. And to have something more useful, you need to connect the corresponding entities which model one real-world object, into something higher. That's a PIMO:Person. Think of PIMO:Person as a real-world friend of yours. He has several emails, two IM accounts, three phone numbers and you also have his home address. And every single piece of these data are represented by one NCO:PersonContact. So you have about 10 entities belonging to the same person.

Part of my project is to find such entities and bring them together under one corresponding PIMO:Person. This is not an easy task for automated solution, because it may be very hard to find related entities or because the given entities does not really describe a Person (mailing-lists in your addressbook etc). So the automated part will do as much as it can (read "if we are completely sure these entities are related, we'll connect them"), the rest will be up to the user. There will be a GUI, which will allow you to view your NCO:PersonContacts and in a simple way let you mark them as one Person. You should also be able to remove entities from Person, which were wrongly associated.

Current state of things

Nepomuk in KDE 4.7 comes with new datamanagement api (DMS), which brings several cool features making life easier. So the first part is rewriting akonadi-nepomuk-contact-feeder to use the DMS. This is basically done and working, although it's not yet on par with the old implementation (some properties are currently missing).

Next step was Nepomuk service, which is running in background watching for new NCO:PersonContact coming from Akonadi. If it catches one, it queries Nepomuk for similar or same NCO:PersonContact which already exists. If there is one and both have the same email address, they are merged into one NCO:PersonContact. Then it looks for related contacts, currently it searches only by name. If we have two or more related NCO:PersonContacts, a PIMO:Person is created with these contacts. This is already working pretty nice, except the detection of new added contacts, this has still some problems.

Today I've written a very simple tool, which lets you browse your PIMO:Person and see all the contacts associated with it. It's basically a debug tool, but may possibly one day evolve into KAddressBook2. Although that would require a Nepomuk-Akonadi writeback feature, which is currently missing.

The future

The nepomuk service will keep expanding with more complex search rules than only a name. It will very likely be divided into a lib part and a service part. The lib will then be reused in the merging application, which I'm planning to start working on sometime next week. The library (and the service) will need some heavy thorough testing, so making this right will probably take most of the time.

...and Telepathy?

Here comes a real use case. In KDE-Telepathy we already started to put Nepomuk side of things into motion. We'll switch the list from Telepathy data to Nepomuk PIMO:Person data soon. You probably see the connection now. Yes, it is the same PIMO:Person which is being created by the Nepomuk service. The merging UI as well as the service will be able to merge a PIMO:Person coming from Telepathy with PIMO:Person coming from PIM and make them one, just like in real-world your IM contacts are the same as some of your PIM contacts. Therefore both sides will get features of the other side. Emailing from Telepathy and chatting from PIM. Well not exactly, but once you have the needed data, nothing is keeping you from opening a KMail window from your contact list or starting a Telepathy chat window from KMail. And that's not the end of it. Any third-party app can take these Persons and make other interesting things with them. For example a Person plasmoid, which will give you possibilities to write your friend directly from desktop. Or tagging these Persons on your photos from DigiKam. 

Give me the code!

All is in git.kde.org, but you need latest KDE compiled from git (with working Nepomuk, Soprano and all that fancy stuff), then you need to compile kdepim-runtime from my clone (branch nepomuk_feeder) and then you can grab the Nepomuk service from my scratch repo. And lastly, the PersonViewer (as I call it right now), is also in scratch repo. 

I wouldn't advise you to actually use it as it may currently make a bigger mess in your Nepomuk database :) But if you're brave enough, compile the kdepim-runtime, restart Akonadi, compile the service, restart Nepomuk Server (or just run the service by "nepomukservicestub nepomukpimmergeservice") and then you can open the PersonViewer to see any created Persons (works only if you have more contacts with the same name).

That's all for today, stay tuned..

Yet another update from KDE-Telepathy land

...still not the "release post" though. We're working hard on it, trust me. But as David already pointed out, there are still few bugs blocking the release, which we want to sort out first.

But let's take a look at some of the things we've been working on, starting with contact list (surprise!). First of all - we've bumped the required Telepathy-Qt4 version to 0.7.1, so be sure to update that one first.

Moving on - groups are in for good. Groups are independent of your accounts, so if you have the same group name in two accounts, all your contacts from these groups will be in one group, no duplicate groups etc. The idea is to be able to have contacts in several groups as that's quite natural (for example you can have someone in "Work" group as well as "People-I'm-doing-sports-with" group), but there is currently no way to do that :) The code is ready, we just haven't figured out how to do that in GUI in the right way. Plus we added a filtering of empty groups (shown when the offline users are shown) and online/offline users counting in the group header.

As a popular demand, we added a slimmer list. You can switch to it from the Settings (the wrench button). You can see it on the screenshot above.

We also switched from our custom blimey notifications to KNotification (ie. Plasma notifications) for errors and general information notifications. For that I wrote a small patch for KNotify, which allows people to set different icon per declared event in the .notifyrc file, which again is more natural for full desktop integration we're aiming for. More about this patch later in separate blogpost.

Daniele also did a great job on file transfers, we have patches merged all over the place (thus the tp-qt4 requirement bump). Currently it works only for Jabber/Gtalk and *should* also work with MSN. Unfortunately, the rest is not supported by Telepathy itself (or rather by its connection managers). Nevertheless, between Jabbers it currently somehow works, though not too many people reported success (if not crashes). But we're on it, no worries.

Sometime ago I also fixed the Start Audio/Video Call buttons, so if you have the telepathy-call-ui, you can also do a video/audio call. In a way. Ok ok, so it also crashes from time to time. Mostly. George K. is currently working on some QML-isation of the call-ui, so the stability will be improved later on. We'll probably ship our first release with these features disabled though.

During the Randa sprint in Swiss earlier this month, we fix an issue with adding new people to your contacts. Dario did a great job pursuing the issue and slashing the bug. Now when there are unconfirmed people waiting for your approval, the contact list will ask you every time you start it.

We also improved the accounts kcm part in Randa. Previously, when you'd miss some critical component, it would just fail silently. Now we have this shiny new overlay saying "You're not set up" (we took some inspiration from Akonadi...and some code too).

The text ui part is getting some new toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts for your better chatting experience.

And lastly, Francesco is working on a presence plasmoid (his GSoC project). It is already merged back in git master and works pretty well, so you can grab the code and go test it. And bug him for missing features. And then buy him a beer. And one for me too.

Oh and George G. finished the Nepomuk integration bits, so we're slowly starting to rewrite the contact list to use Nepomuk data instead of direct Telepathy data. Although the first release will be most probably without the Nepomuk integration as that will take us another bunch of weeks and we want to have something out already.

Everything is pretty usable already, so you can go and grab the code, setup is pretty easy, just follow the instructions here and if anything does not work as supposed, we put together a small troubleshooting guide.

Quick update on KDE Telepathy Contact List - now with groups, too!

Just a very quick update on things inside Contact List. One of the major missing features before KDE Telepathy (yes, we still have no cool project name..ideas?) release can be made is groupping support in contact list. I've been working on this for the past few days and I'm proud to announce - Groups are working! Oh yes and that's not all. We support cross-account groups, that means, that the account the contact belongs to really does not matter. Just think groups. You can also have one contact in multiple groups (though there's currently no GUI way how to do that). 

This is not yet in master as it is still bit like a minefield currently, but I'm so excited about this that I had to share :) It's getting really close now. I also hope that after some discussion with Collabora guys I can have this model included in Telepathy-Qt4-Yell project, which host various models (and we are already using the AccountsModel in Cotnact List) which will hopefully one day get merged back into Telepathy-Qt4 master.

As pictures say more than thousand words, behold...

I'll post a longer blogpost about all the new fancy things we're working on after the groups are all finished (this is a priority #1 now). So stay tuned. 

By the way, the historicaly first release of KDE Telepathy is really imminent now ;) 

KDE Telepathy Contact List: Avatars and Custom presence messages

Here's yet another update on the KDE-Telepathy's Contact list component, which I'm working on with Red Hat's blessing. First great news is, that my branch got merged back into the master kde:telepathy-contact-list repo. So all development is now continuing there. It was not really a merge as much as a rewrite. All the fancy Nepomuk stuff was stripped to have something working, but the work on adding it back will start really soon. Besides this great milestone, there has been added some great new features as well.

But before I continue, I'd like to make one thing clear. This is not supposed to be just a Kopete replacement. The vision of KDE-Telepathy project goes far beyond that. I strongly suggest you read recent George Goldberg's great blog posts about KDE-Telepathy's vision to be more clear :)

Anyway, now let's look at the new features in contact list that we've been keeping ourselves busy with. We're trying to look for new cool ways and new approaches for implementing the usual stuff. So far I think that we're doing great :)

First thing is the overall window redesign. We've moved the account controls from bottom to the upper part, added an avatar and your name and possibility to set your own presence message. Let's take a closer look on some of these parts.

Avatars

As Telepathy aims at multiprotocol support, you can have a whole bunch of protocols active, each one with different avatar. So the problem is - which one to display? A possible solution can be to select one avatar and set it for all other accounts and thus unify them all. I can already hear all the voices saying "Hey, I want to be able to set different avatar per account" - trust me, I hear you. I will work on this later and also an overall better avatars handling. But hey, it's a start :) So, right now, when you click the avatar, a menu popup appears with all the avatars and you can choose whichever you want. And you can of course select a different one altogether - from your own file. This will currently set this avatar to all accounts currently in use. 

Custom presence messages

Next great feature is setting a presence message. This is already implemented with per account settings. Currently, when you set a presence message from the contact list directly, it will be set to all accounts. But if you open the account presence menu, you can set a different presence message there, which won't override the main message (doh!), but it will be set only for that particular account. But once you set the presence message from the contact list again, the overridden message will be overwritten. There will be an option to turn this behavior off though and if all will go well, you will be able to select for which accounts to turn this off. Neat, huh? :) Another thing that is planned are saved presets - you can easily choose a pre-set message and presence type.

The rest

Then there are few other things in the works - a contact tooltips (shows info about contact), full contact info dialog, a message-received-icon and hopefully file transfer support too. From the other parts - we have a working almost-working Plasmoid for setting your presences, we have working KCM module for setting accounts, we have working text chat UI (with adium themes support!), currently-not-working approver notifications (the part that lets you know when you receive new message).

So what's missing you say? There are a few unfinished tasks in various parts (for example error handling in contact list (infrastructure is there, it just needs connecting the bits), or reusing already opened tab in text-ui (the tabs currently represent Telepathy channels, once the channel is closed and reopened, it creates new tab)) . And we could surely use some help to finish the left-over tasks! Once the most important tasks are done, we will release a pre-release (and we're really close now). We also have a few Junior Jobs in KDE-Telepathy, which can bring you into speed and KDE development generaly.

So if you are interested even the smallest bit, if you want to be part of this awesomness that's to come, be sure to let us know either on our mailing list - kde-telepathy at kde dot org - or at our freenode channel #kde-telepathy. Everybody is welcomed! (Though we're currently out of fruit baskets..)

Quick update on telepathy-kde-contactlist

Here's this week updates on telepathy-kde-contactlist, which is being written as part of my diploma thesis for Red Hat. No very big changes since last time as the school got a bit overwhelming, but still something noteworthy.

 First of all I replaced the "Connecting..." and "Connected!" inner-popup-messages with a nice busy animation right over the account buttons (also the busy indicator comes from your current icon theme). So whenever you set yourself to be online, the animation pops in and stops right when you're online. Also, if you hover over the button, you'll see the account's current presence type ("Online", "Away" etc) in a tooltip. There could (I'd say should) be some better presence indication which you can see right away, but since the account icons themselvs are very small, there is no room for showing a status icon overlay, though it would be cool. Nevertheless, I'll try to come up with something.

Another cool thing is that now the accounts are dynamically added to contact list when you add a new account elsewhere with Telepathy (for example in the KCM Telepathy module or Empathy config). You add a new account and a new button appears. Simple. Same with removing - the button disappears. Also with that comes an error message inner-popup informing you, that some of your accounts was removed from Telepathy or that it was disabled. That's because when the account is disabled/removed, its button is also removed from the bottom, so that you won't end up wondering, where did the button go.

Next three things will describe one screenshot:

1) The top toolbar is now icons only and though you can set a global KDE config option for the toolbar text and/or icons, I disabled it here. Imagine just those three buttons with the icon text next to them - "Add new contact", "Show/Hide groups", "Show/Hide offline users" - now add at least 24x24 icons and imagine how big would have the width of the window be. Simply way too much (especially when there will be more buttons). And this is not an application, that you'll run in fullscreen, but rather in as smallest size as possible. So this presented two usability issues and I picked the lesser-evil-one.

2) Thanks to David Edmundson, you can now hide offline users (the third icon) and have the contacts sorted alphabetically (it will also be possible to sort them by status later).

3) The pretty group headers are now back with a expand/collapse sign now (the "-" on the left). The expand/collapse button will be done differently in the end, it's just there so you know the state of the group. Speaking of which, the account groups are still not supported. But if anyone would like to write a groupping model for that, you're more than welcome!

That's it for now. You can still grab the code from kde:clones/telepathy-contact-list/mklapetek/telepathy-contact-list-new (see the wiki) but it will soon be merged back to the main tree. There are a few crashes currently and I also want to implement error handling (connection etc) first and right after that, I'm going to merge this back.

Stay tuned for more updates from the KDE Telepathy land...

Update on telepathy-kde-contactlist: Repo back online!

So the sysadmins fixed the gitolite bug which prevented from creating new personal clones, that means, that you can grab the contact list code now. But be warned, there are dragons ahead. Well in fact, there should be dragons ahead, but there are not. Yet. We're still at basic functionality only (ie. listing contacts, starting text channel [for which you need the chat handler] and setting yourself online/away/offline [for which you need to have some Telepathy accounts configured {for which you can use the Telepathy Accounts KCM}]). Anyway, here you go:

git clone \
kde:clones/telepathy-contact-list/mklapetek/telepathy-contact-list-new \ 
telepathy-contact-list

(make sure you have set the prefix rewrite rule as in the KDE Git manual, I also had to break it like that so it could fit to the blog's template width)

cd telepathy-contact-list
mkdir build && cd build

For 32bit systems:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix` \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull ..

For 64bit systems:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix` \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull -DLIB_SUFFIX=64 ..

Then simply do

make

and after a while you're done. You can then run it without installing (make install), just do

./telepathy-kde-contactlist

from the build/ folder (if you're not there) and there goes your new contact list.

One note for those of you who previously tried the code; we're no longer working on branch mck182, but we're on master now ;)

Stay tuned for more updates!

 

What's cooking with the telepathy-kde-contact-list?

Part of my diploma thesis agreement with Red Hat was to blog about my work for the KDE Telepathy team. I'm currently taking care of the contact list (CL) component. There was a discussion about what the CL should be able to do and what not. For the first KDE Telepathy release we decided to implement it as a moreless full featured app, like kopete. After that it may be taken down to parts and reintegrated elsehow in the desktop environment (though the CL will still exist and will be used, just some features may be moved elsewhere). But let's not discuss this just yet, it's way to early for that. Instead, let's see, how is the CL coming.

So far, the basics are almost all in place. We have a working contacts model, working presence setting and you can also start a text chat. And that's pretty much it now :) But don't worry, there's a loooong todo list of features waiting ;) Let's look closer on some of the things.

Contacts model

I started to implement my own model at first, based on telepathy-call-ui (the KDE part for making voice calls). This was really just a basic tree model with only few features. Though working, it still needed fair amount of work. Then David Edmundson showed me Telepathy-Qt4-Yell project, which has pretty solid and full-featured model already done. So I dumped the old model and adapted a new one, based on this project model. Thanks to the great architecture of Tp-Qt4-Yell (and the CL too :P), it took only a few hours to get this up and running. So this is now under the hood. There's still need for filtering/sorting proxy model, groupping model, hiding-offline-contacts model (some work has already begun on this) and a few other things. Bottom line is that we have a fully working contacts roster (with avatars and everything), but unsorted (by status nor by name).

Contacts view

The view is based on QTreeView and though it works like a tree (you can expand/collapse groups), it doesn't and won't look like a tree (in filemanager for example). When there is a support for metacontacts, which will group several contacts under one, the sub-contacts will then be padded, but no guiding lines will be painted. I just don't like the kopete-filemanager-look. It feels cluttered and over-lined. So the aim is to keep it visually simple, nice and appealing (UI artists wanted!).

One feature I particulary like about the view are the delegate overlay buttons. I borrowed the idea from digiKam, where it was implemented by Marcel Wiesweg and based my code on that. It's basically about showing buttons (KGuiItem) on mouse-hover and hiding them on mouse-away. These buttons are used particulary for starting text/audio/video channel or sending a file. They should be a context menu replacement in a way (don't worry, context menu will still be there with all you'd expect ;) It also hides those buttons (capabilities), that the contact doesn't support. It nicely fades in and paints itself under the user name (see screenshot around). Another cool thing is, that if there is a status message present (below the username), it is faded out first, so these two UI items wouldn't overlap. On mouse-away the status message of course fades back in and the overlay fades out.

Another thing done in the view are system messages. For example when there's a error or you're disconnected etc. There are two types of messages - info and error. Info messages will fade out automatically after few secs and they are blue-ish (probably will apply theme's color later). The error ones will stay until you close them (making sure you read what's wrong) and these have light-red color. Both slides up from the CL bottom edge, see the screenshot. Although indicating the "Connecting..." and "Connected" will be done differently in the end.

At the CL bottom, there are buttons, which I call AccountButtons, and these take care of setting the presence of particular accounts. You can see it on the first screenshot. How many accounts you have, that many buttons will be there. I'm also working on a simple way to shield user from so many buttons and introduce a way to set all your accounts online at once. But I haven't given much thought to this yet.

TODO

There's a plenty of things left to do. For example the part of finding/adding new contacts, dialog for editing your own account information, way of joining rooms...and of course the filtering/sorting/offline-hiding proxy model with search capabilities. Later also integration with nepomuk is planned, but that's rather distant future now. Simply put - plenty of work left to do :)

Where to get it?

Currently I have a problem with my git account and my personal clone repo, so the code is not available at the moment, but I'll post a blogpost right when it's ready again, please be patient ;)

By the way, is there some simple Qt/KDE method for painting shadows beneath pixmap? If you know of any, please let me know in the comments. Also sorry for the need to log in to post comments, this is a TypePad restriction for free blog version (and I don't have enough money to pay 9$/month :P ), so please just use OpenID or Google account or something like that to log in. I like TypePad very much, it has nice features and such, but this and no per-tag-rss are really missing..