KDE Telepathy 0.5 released

Few days ago the awesome team behind the (still-)new Instant Messaging suite for KDE Workspaces released fifth major version of the communication suite, codenamed "D'oh". Our release cycle was considerably shorter than usual because we wanted to get distributions to include us in their autumn releases, but still we managed to get in lots of good work.

Probably the biggest and most visible change is in the chatting application, which is now able to display images from sent/received image links inline, right in the window. This is done using plugin architecture, which was done as this year's GSoC project by Lasath Fernando. There are more plugins on the way, like embedding a YouTube videos, displaying a LaTeX formulas for all you geeks out there and reading messages out loud for you. We'll also have a plugin which lets you format text like in GTalk, for example if you send message *like this*, it will be seen like this. Thanks to the plugin architecture we can do all kinds of magic with the messages (not that we plan to).

KRunner fans will also be pleased to hear that you can now control your presence via KRunner as well. Simply type "im away" and you're away. Type "im busy Watching movie" and all your contacts know you're watching a movie. Press the KRunner's "?" button to discover more KTp shortcuts (we have quite a few ;).

Several people requested to have even tinier contact list. And so we did as they asked. With 0.5, there's a new list style, called "Minimalistic", which takes your smallest font set in your style (can be changed in System Settings) and uses that as the base for computing the sizes of the rest. We also improved the accessibility of our contact list buttons, which now has more sensible and clearer tooltips. Pressing the Wrench button you'll also discover a "Make a Call...", which allows you to dial an arbitrary number with SIP accounts.

Many many improvements were done in the log viewer, which was taken over by my fellow Czech developer Dan Vratil. He really did take the log viewer into a whole new level and the fixes and improvements are still coming.

The plasmoids didn't receive many new features. But heavy amount of work on the Quick chat plasmoid was done by Aleix Pol. We hit some bumps in Plasma and that slowed the development down a bit. For now, the plasmoids (except the Presence plasmoid) all remain in alpha stage, so please treat it as such (and do report any and all bugs you'll find!).

For users having trouble connecting etc. we now provide a basic Telepathy debugger, which you can run with "ktp-debugger". This gathers all logs from Telepathy components and allows you to easily paste them and send them to us. No more killing stuff and running from console ;)

Lastly, during a discussion at Akademy, we decided to drop IRC support from KDE Telepathy. It's simply because there are lots of high quality KDE/Qt IRC clients and we don't have enough manpower to develop and maintain support for IRC, so we decided to drop it completely. We plan to revise this decision at next Akademy though.

And to end with some good news - I was offered a sponsorship for my work on KDE Telepathy by the great Blue Systems and I gladly accepted it. So now I'll have more time to spend on this great project :)

Sources are available at the usual place - http://download.kde.org/unstable/kde-telepathy/0.5.0/src/. Your distribution may have packages (or will have soon; there are no packages for Kubuntu Precise yet, but will be soon, Fedora should have packages ready for all supported releases, Arch should have it already, no idea about others, sorry).

All help is always welcomed, so if you would like to get involved, just email our mailing list kde-telepathy@kde.org and we'll take care of you. Promise.

Comments

[Gunnicom.wordpress.com]

As importing of kopete logs seem to not landed. Will it be possible to merge the kopete logs later on with the chat logs that will be logged by telepathy now?
I dont want to change to telepathy as i dont want to lose my old logs, and dont want to lose the new logs if i import the old ones once the importer is ready.

[Eduardo Sanchez]

There's plenty to dislike in KTP's current form -- the myriad of dependencies, the complexity of the build, the lack of some features deemed as essential by many users -- but it is an awesome product, with lots of potential and definitely worth trying. Even more so, I can tell with certainty that developers are very patient with grumpy users like me, and their manner was always friendly and helpful. I really appreciate the help received and wish KTP all kinds of success. Btw, I'm using it as my primary IM platform ... except when some instability shows its ugly head. Congrats Martin and thanks for your help!

[Marty]

@Gunnicom - Yeah, that was one of the features that had to be cut from the release as there wasn't enough time :/ But it will be possible in the future, the log formats stays the same, so all we need is some nice UI and we're done :)

@Eduardo - The complexity is usually solved by packaging, where there should/could be one simple metapackage that will install you all that is needed (I know there is one for Fedora, if there isn't for your distro, bug the packagers! Or tell us, we might bug them for you). The essential features - what are those? We know we miss metacontacts, but that has taken a serious leap forward thanks to Aleix Pol, who stormed this front. We want to get it right and not ship with some half-baked stuff, that we'll have to change in the future again. So we're rather waiting for proper KDE-wide metacontacts support.
As for the rest - we'll always be glad to help, so should you have any problems, head over to the forums.kde.org, file bugs at bugs.kde.org or join #kde-telepathy on freenode and just shout out ;)

[Eduardo Sanchez]

Martin, I use Slackware. Telepathy is perceived by the Slackware crew as incorporating some Gnome-like dependencies so there is not much in the way of telepathy love there. Even so, I think a software release should be of straightforward compilation, but that's just my opinion.

As features deemed as essential, I was meaning something in the way of notification for contacts being on/offline. You told me this is being worked on, so it's a matter of time. I know for a fact that you take these things seriously. Thank you!

[Jackdean666]

Does this thing support voice and video chat? we been bitching at pidgin for 6 years or more? maybe 8 to add it, the pricks won't do it.. I might try it out in in kde 4.9.

[Marty]

@Jackdean666 - Yup, it does. It was one of our primary goals :)

[jerf]

Great release, thanks!

Just two small things: is it possible to be able to close contact list by left-clicking on the presence applet, when the contact list is open? Now left-clicking on the presence applet opens contact list if it wasn't already open, which is nice, but you can't close it this way.
And another thing: is it possible to somehow indicate in the contact list whether a particular contact is available for video chat? Like Google is doing in their Gmail web-interface by changing green dot to green camera for contacts that are available for videochat.

[Marty]

@jerf - thanks! The first thing - it is most certainly technically possible, I even had a patch. But the situation is not as easy as it might look like, for example what you do if the window is behind another window and you click the icon? Should it come on top or hide? If hide, then it's not that user friendly. If show above others, then it's not easy to do without abusing kwin, which we were strongly advised against. Then again - windows should be closed by the proper controls, not by clicking a systray icon. However most of the apps don't follow this, so we'd be in trouble with that. I'll start a discussion about this on plasma mailing list (which also works as kde-workspace mailing list) and whatever the outcome will be, we'll follow that.

The other thing - if you're using the 'normal' list style, you can see that only if you right-click the contact and the corresponding menu items are either disabled or enabled. The full list then shows this info on hover. I think we can do better though. Adding it to the tooltip might be handy and/or changing the presence icon to a camera icon could be also very nice. I'll see what we can do about this, thanks for the report :)

[Roman F]

Hey Marty,
many thanks for this great IM. Its my prime IM for some time now and the only thing i'm missing so far is a notification sound for incoming messages in an active chatwindow. In my notification menu there is a checkbox for that but either it's not working properly or the translation is wrong. I'm often doing some stuff apart my screen while the chatwindow has the focus, so i don't get notified when a new message comes in :(

[Marty]

@Roman F - Hey, that might very well be a bug :) There are two notifications - when you receive a message without opened window ("new incoming chat") and when you receive new message ("incoming message"). Although thinking about it, it is probably a design decision - most people don't want to be notified about every message they get while chatting.

Anyways, would it be possible to file a bug at bugs.kde.org? You'll also get input from more developers, including the component maintainer (which I'm not). And we always forget things not in our bugtracker :)

Thanks a lot.

[Roman F]

Hi,
thank you for your quick reply :)

So I did my first bugreport ... hopefully at the right place.

Keep up the good work :)

[Koldo Lopez]

Good morning, I wonder what I have to do to use the video through my webcam, as I have created multiple accounts, including with gtalk, messenger and facebook and I can not use it.

thanks

[Marty]

@Koldo Lopez - you have to install ktp-call-ui in order to be able to make calls. Also you're better off using forum.kde.org, we have our own section there ;)