Hi everyone! Today I’ll offer my little blogspace to Daniel E. Moctezuma, our mentored student for Google Summer of Code  2010 He’ll explain what’s about to happen in KMess soon… enjoy!

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Hello everyone!

I’m happy to announce that KMess 2.0.1 is out right now! (for those who are wondering, it is a Live Messenger alternative for KDE4 )

This release also contains a couple new shiny things other than the usual “fixed this, improved that” mutter:

• Full hand-writing support! yay ISF-Qt!
• Synchronization between Messenger’s friendly names, display pictures and personal messages
• Fixes to the unbelievable MSN server issues of recent history

Now, head on to SourceForge to get it before everyone else starts to package it

Then let us know what you think of it! You can reach us by using our forum, our development mailing list kmess-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, IRC at #kmess on FreeNode, or by using LikeBack: open KMess, go to the Help menu, click “Send a comment to the developers”.

Also thanks to all translators, contributors and testers, not forgetting all users who sent us feedback via LikeBack! Hats off

LikeBack is a very effective way to allow your application’s users to contribute actively with your project.

It is composed by two parts:

• A frontend, the most important part, that which will be seen and used by the users.
• A backend, which the developers can use to see and answer to what users had to say.

In seven months of activity (we’ve started using it in KMess since february 2009) we’ve received well over 2500 comments: of those, the vast majority was useful to us: this should help understanding how bloody useful LikeBack is.

The flow of comments will be to you extremely useful to understand what your users want: we found that LikeBack really helped in giving the project a direction. It will be *their* direction – which needs to be also *yours*, if you want to keep your project alive! I think that 99% of the time, you’ll find the direction suggested by LikeBack comments will be the best one

Now a little tutorial on how it works, and how to install it (it’s not hard!):

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…when it takes two thousands, five hundred and thirty-five useful comments to get an insult:

«Why, thank you!»

Lovely!

We consider this as a great milestone

Hi my 25 readers!

I’m very, very happy to announce that the KMess team has released KMess version 2.0, after more than an year and an half of development!

Here’s some quick screenshots for you (there’s a better visual guide at our site):

The main window.

Chat window with muliple tabs support.

The contact list screen.

As you can evidently see if you had KMess 1.5 installed, a whole lot of work went in this release (compare the new with the old).

First of all, we’ve ported it to KDE 4, and it was about time for that! The rest of the stuff is a pretty impressive list:

• Support to receive and send Ink (hand-written) messages and Winks.
• Improved custom emoticons management.
• Options to copy a contact’s email, name, message, listened music and links present in the name/message
• List of contact events, such as logins and logouts.
• Open chat windows can be used again when reconnecting.
• Quick retype of previous sent messages, using Ctrl+Up/Ctrl+Down.
• MSN connections over HTTP, to deal with corporate firewalls which only allow connections to browse the web.
• Support to chat with offline and invisible contacts.
• Support to search for contacts in the contact list.
• Support to send longer chat messages.
• Option to choose the browser used to open web sites, Live Mail, and MSN support sites.
• Support to group all chats in the same chat window (tabbed chatting).
• Option to select a directory where all received files will be put.
• Option to choose the interval of ports used for fast file transfers.
• Option to keep short notes for each contact.
• Contact List history box showing contact connections and disconnections.
• Support to Messenger Plus Live’s text coloring and formatting.
• Support for DBus remote application control.
• Option to choose a previously chosen display picture.
• Support for dark KDE color schemes.
• Beautified long names and messages with a nice fading effect.
• Drag&Drop support between the contact list and the chat window (invite contacts to chats) and within the contact list (sort groups and move contacts between groups).
• Chat logs browser.
• Contact list exporting in XML and CSV formats.
• Option to show the own user’s display picture in chat.
• Mixed contact list view, to group all offline contacts in a single “Offline” group.
• Customizable display picture size in the contacts list.
• Option to disable the background hummingbird image in the contact list.
• More options to improve customization of the Contact List.
• Support for KDE’s KWallet, to store passwords in a secure way.
• Automatic detection of network connection and disconnection.
• Option to block notifications when the status is set to Busy.
• Option to disable displaying of received winks.
• Automatic same-status reconnection to MSN after unwanted disconnections.
• Option to disable and hide annoying received emoticons.
• Customizable toolbars and keyboard shortcuts.
• Saved accounts manager window.
• “Now Listening” support for all MPRIS-enabled media players like Amarok.

That was quite a long list, huh? And it doesn’t include the countless bug fixes and improvements to existing features…

Anyway, distributions should be including KMess 2.0 packages pretty soon, so to install it go looking in your package manager first. If they’re slow, compile it: go to our downloads page and click “KMess Source” and then on the Installing link below it to see how! It’s quite easy and quick, some 3 minutes and you’ll have KMess running

A final note for 1.5 users: We’ve prepared a simple upgrade script to port your 1.5 configuration over to the 2.0 one, run the mergeFromKmess15.pl in the source tarball

If you have any more questions or comments, please don’t refrain from telling us at our forum, on our development mailing list kmess-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, via IRC at #kmess2 on FreeNode, or using LikeBack: open KMess, go to the Help menu, click “Send a comment to the developers”

We sincerely hope you will enjoy KMess 2 at least as much as we enjoyed creating it!

Hi, yesterday we’ve released our second beta of our next-gen Live Messenger client for KDE!

We’ve as usual put a lot of effort on it, and I invite everyone who uses MSN more than other IM protocols to give it a shot!

As a sample of the countless improved things in this version, here’s a little list of changes:

• fixed disconnections after many hours of use.
• fixed losing KDE Wallet passwords.
• fixed typing notifications not appearing in WLM 2009.
• fixed resending messages already sent as offline messages.
• fixed searching for offline contacts.
• fixed time of arrival of offline messages.
• fixed contact list group sorting.
• fixed many memory leaks.
• improved the Chat History dialog and its integration with KMess.
• improved drag and drop support in contact list.
• improved handwriting message sending.
• improved the file transfers window’s behavior.
• improved chat session management.
• updated English handbook.
• 10 updated translations.

Obligatory shots:

There’s a lot more, specially under the hood; we try to keep KMess’ code easily understandable and well-commented so if you’d like to hack on it, I guarantee it’s very easy (I’ve actually learned Qt over KMess’ code, writing my first patch ever after less than a week, that had to mean something.. right? Right?! )

Beta 2 marks our very own KDE-style string freeze, so that you’ll be certain that your translations will be still valid when the final release will be out. [This is actually a call for translators! If you can, open up this page and help us, thank you very much]

To take a closer look to Beta 2, our screenshots page provides a nice visual guide on it!

On unrelated news, I’d like to spend a couple words on LikeBack: if you don’t know about it, it’s an awesome way to easily get feedback from your app’s users. We first learned about it from BasKet Note Pads, in its KDE3 incarnation, then I fell in love with it and ported it to KDE4 around October 2008, and fnally put it into action around February 2009. Since then, me and our Sjors have improved it a whole lot: having received our first comment on February the 4th, I can proudly say that as of today May 11th, we’re a tiny bit short of our 1200 reports mark!!

We’re really proud of this, a whole lot of people have helped us improve KMess! We’re listening, and you’ll find that KMess 2.1 will contain the vast majority of your requests and suggestions.

I think I’ll shortly blog about it in a deeper fashion, the 1.2 version released some weeks ago contains a whole lot of sauce, and I’ll explain LikeBack and its history more thoroughly, too.

As usual, if you have anything to say about KMess (or Likeback and you aren’t willing to wait for the next post!), the discussion is open both here and at our boards!