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.
It's great to see that telepathy has been released for the first time. Looking forward to the other telepathy related articles.
Posted by: Openid | Friday, 29 July 2011 at 08:15
does it support meta-contacts (like kopete)?
Posted by: Andrea | Friday, 29 July 2011 at 10:57
second question :-)
there is some "import settings" from kopete? which features i will not find working if i switch to telepathy?
Posted by: Andrea | Friday, 29 July 2011 at 11:18
Nice!
Only one comment:
In the spirit of the (if I'm not mistaken) ongoing effort to cut down on technical buzzwords in the KDE UI and replacing them by functional newbie-friendly descriptions, the window title should probably not be "Telepathy KDE Contact List", but rather just "Contact List". or "Instant Messaging Contacts" or something.
Posted by: Uetsah | Friday, 29 July 2011 at 14:01
@Andrea - no, not yet. We're planning this to the 0.3 release. And no import settings either, sorry :) I suppose there will be many missing features compared to Kopete currently as this is really our first release, so we miss most of the stuff.
@Uetsah - good point, thanks, I'll change it
Posted by: Marty | Friday, 29 July 2011 at 14:04
Hey that is an awesome blog post and Congrats for the release. I thought call-ui was held back for this release, but seems it made it :)
Do you know if gkiagia is going to implement webcam support soon?
Posted by: Venky | Friday, 29 July 2011 at 17:20
@Venky: No, the call-ui didn't make it. How did you get that impression?
Regarding webcam support... I don't even know myself. I'll try to reboot the project at the kde-telepathy sprint, which is in ~1 month, and come up with a plan to finish it soon.
Posted by: George Kiagiadakis | Friday, 29 July 2011 at 19:17
I checked it out and it still does not have a tray icon. Will this functionality be added at some point or it wont have it for for some design decisions. If so, what is the rationalization for the lack of it?
Posted by: me.yahoo.com/a/d4zFA60OuviwVPdkiu1e4ngOa5iWVfE- | Friday, 29 July 2011 at 22:48
No, there's a presence plasmoid serving as systray icon. Therefore contact list itself won't have an icon itself..
Posted by: Marty | Saturday, 30 July 2011 at 01:37
Just checked the presence plasmoid and its a bit different but it works.
Two things prevented me from using it full time. The lack of tray icon and the presence plasmoid has solve that one.
The other one is its current inability to show who is blocked and who isnt. and a way to block/unblock somebody I hope this feature will be added soon.
Is there a priority of what features to add first?. I would consider this ability i am missing to be among the basic ones and most people will probably notice its absence.
You guys should conduct some sort of a survey to ask what features people consider to be basic and are most important to them.
Thanks for a great work. Looking forward to future releases.
Posted by: me.yahoo.com/a/d4zFA60OuviwVPdkiu1e4ngOa5iWVfE- | Saturday, 30 July 2011 at 03:09
@whoeverposted above
There are tonnes of missing features, if that's all you noticed, I think we've done alright :)
Blocking code is there, but commented out, there was some weird technical reason that I'm hoping to sort out for 0.2.
As for a TODO list if you read my post on our ML that covers my personal goals of things to sort out. Discuss there if you disagree. Priority is mostly based around on what any of the developers find annoying, because we're users too.
Posted by: David Edmundson | Saturday, 30 July 2011 at 16:58
i have too many contacts from facebook, google plus and msn, if you just implement meta-contacts i will start using it right now!
Posted by: Andrea | Sunday, 31 July 2011 at 11:26
@Andrea - yes, they are planned. You can watch this bug[0] so you'll know when that feature has landed ;)
[0] - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=278777
Posted by: Marty | Sunday, 31 July 2011 at 12:02
Nice!
I am also missing the meta contact functionality. Further, I could not move a gtalk user to a different group it seems. I got some strange warnings in the systray. Finally I noticed that it is using the gnome keyring, will it support the kde keyring soon?
Posted by: Eothred.wordpress.com | Monday, 01 August 2011 at 11:47
Hello Just checking if you are going to update this with the links to the other blogposts?
Posted by: Skreech2 | Friday, 12 August 2011 at 00:17
I really hope that Telepathy-KDE team introduce a menubar to the contact list window for consistency sake with other KDE apps. For those who prefer the consolidated wrench menu, you can do like what Dolphin did in KDE 4.7.
Posted by: 3rabuntu.wordpress.com | Friday, 26 August 2011 at 09:01