KDE Telepathy 0.4 with audio/video calls and chat log browser

It's been four long months and even though lots of us (the awesome ktp team) were busy with exams, wedding, other work, we managed to get quite exciting new features in the just-released instant messaging suite for KDE Workspaces. One of them is support for audio/video calls using KDE Telepathy. Right now GTalk/XMPP video calls are fully supported/tested. But it's our first release of the calling stuff, so there might be some bugs. In order to compile this, you need Farstream libraries, TelepathyQt compiled with Farstream support (should be automatic if you have Fatstream installed), Telepathy Gabble newer than 0.15.4 and QtGStreamer 0.10.2 and other GStreamer libs (in Kubuntu it's libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev if you want to compile stuff by hand).

Another great feature is the long awaited chat history browser, which requires telepathy-logger installed (if you had installed this before, your history was logged all the time, now you can view it too ;) and telepathy-logger-qt, which we took under our wings from Collabora and it's part of the release. For the next release, we plan to have Kopete logs import. If you are brave/adventureous enough, you can get this python script and try it. You have to process the log files one by one, the usage is simply ./log2log.py <kopeteLogFile>. It's mostly just proof-of-concept, so use it at your own risk (always make backup first). Feel free to improve it and send back to us.

Next big point is better Plasma integration. We created two new plasmoids and one krunner plugin. The first plasmoid is basic and simple contact list. It lists your (unsorted atm) contacts and you can start a chat by clicking the contact. We plan to improve the way it embedds in panels, so one can have a hideable panel on the side. Some other improvements and features are in the plans too.

 

Second new plasmoid is a quick chat plasmoid, basically a facebook/gmail chat interface right on your desktop.  It's primarily meant to be put into a panel. There it sits and pops up new icon when you receive new chat, with little messages counter on top.

 

Although these two plasmoids work, please keep in mind it's more like a tech-preview version. We released it to get a wider user feedback and testing. So if you encounter bugs or have some improvements in mind, please post them to our bugzilla or our forum.

The krunner integration allows you to start actions such as chat, audio/video calling or sending a file from krunner. You simply start typing the name of your contact and it offers all available actions.

 

Besides these new features we made small improvements all over the place. For example you can now very simply rename your accounts by clicking on their names in the Accounts settings window. The icon can be changed in that same way. Often requested was also automatic connection on login, this can now be set in the IM settings as well (admittably that config interface could use some rethinking). We also have a kipi-plugin to send pictures to your contacts, but it's not part of this release as there are some issues with upstream libraries, which needs to be solved first. Here's a list of another note-worthy features:

ktp-common-internals

• Enhanced contact filtering
• Added ContactGridWidget

ktp-accounts-kcm

• Added profile for KDE Talk
• Set XMPP resource to "kde-telepathy" by default

ktp-text-ui

• Improvements to adium theme rendering
• Fix adiumxtra installer http://bit.ly/HgZvEB

ktp-send-file

• Ported to use ContactGridWidget

ktp-kded-module

• Started by MissionControl when actually needed instead of at login

ktp-auth-handler

• Retrieve the refresh token for MSN Oauth2 authentication (but still cannot refresh the access token)

 

Overall we fixed 109 reported bugs since the 0.3 release, of which 17 are crashes and 16 are wishes for enhancements. Complete list is here.

 

We are also in the process of revising our wiki pages to create a central place for users to look for basic support and to help them guide through common tasks. If you are a user of KDE Telepathy and you'd like to help the project in other ways than coding, this could be your chance to join. Feel free to visit #kde-telepathy IRC channel on Freenode and ask around or email our mailing list [email protected]. Of course we are always very happy to welcome any contributors, so if you feel like joining a KDE project, we'll get you started. We'll all be at Akademy in Talinn and I will host a BoF session about KDE Telepathy. It's open to everyone, so feel free to stop by and meet us and/or get involved.

 

The tarballs with the 0.4 source code can be found on KDE's ftp servers, distributions may have packages.

 

Finally I'd like to thank everyone that contributed to this release, coders, testers, bug reporters, translators, packagers and everyone else who contributed in any way. Thanks!

If you like our software, you can thank us by donating.

Comments

[Luca Manganelli]

Compliments to your beautiful girlfriend :D

[Jancoding.wordpress.com]

Very cool ;)

It's really nice to have another option for Jabber/XMPP videoconferencing, and the plasma integration looks awesome. Congratulations!

[šumski]

Made a Kubuntu PPA if anyone's interested:
https://launchpad.net/~hrvojes/+archive/ktp-kde
Waiting for a package or two to get published, it should be usable in an hour or two.

Great work on a new release!
Marty, a question for you: What is the purpose of installed headers of ktp-text-ui?

[šumski]

Sorry, i built it with logger, and now it's OK

[Hugo Lopes]

Hello friend!
Congratulations for the article! I'm using Fedora 17 x64 and "KDE IM" on the displayed version on his blog, however the audio and video icons do not appear to me. Already well researched on the Internet and can not find exactly what packages I have installed. Just for a comparison of Pidgin I can make calls with audio / video, but in the "KDE IM" no. Could you help me saying what I have to install packages in Fedora 17 x64?

I appreciate your help if possible.

Hugo Lopes

[Marty]

@Hugo - You need to have ktp-call-ui installed. Once you install it, please relogin/reboot. Also it is very important that the other side has a support for the calls, otherwise you won't see the icon to start calls ;)

As for Fedora - I'm sorry, I have no idea. But if you know your way around with IRC, go to #fedora-kde and ask, good people there ;)

[Account Deleted]

Hi,

Greetings for the day !!

It would be much appreciated if you could provide me inputs on KDE Telepahy IM. I have a following issue,

I installed Fedora Core 17 on my laptop 2 days back. It was a fresh install with deleting all the existing partitions and creating new one. Yesterday when I started the laptop, I found my status as ONLINE in this messenger and was showing around 90 contacts. I did not configure any of the accounts but I found 2 accounts automatically got configured. It looks like the accounts were using my unix username. I immediately deleted those accounts.

Can you please help me on this? Is this something strange or this is a normal behavior? Are there any default chat rooms which automatically get configured or is there something related to KDE wallet? I am little bit worried. Please help.

Many Thanks,
Nikhil Bhalwankar

[Lina_Dunaievska]

Great job guys! And impressive number of bugs fixed ;)
I do not understand how your service differ from Skype or Videolink2.me?

Cheers, Lina.

[Marty]

@Lina - you can think of it as a completely free (both free as in "free beer" and free as in freedom) and open source alternative to those services.