This is my first post syndicated on the Planet, and incidentally also the first after an entire year of inactivity in my kmess-related blog. Having a lot of readers is quite a good incentive to writing

This post will first show you the next upcoming version of our fav msn client (first beta will be out this week probably), then tell you about a new project we’re slowly starting, libISF, which will be a library to encode and decode Microsoft’s ISF format (the spec is open now).

1. KMess 2.0 beta

Since 1.5.1 has been released – a couple months short of a year ago – KMess has changed immensely. It is only barely recognizable! After the porting effort, we’ve rewritten practically everything, bringing it to a whole new level. It is now a lot more integrated in KDE 4,  has undergone (multiple) reviews to improve its usability, and contains a whole lot of new stuff. But let’s directly see a bit of it

Here’s the Contact List window:

The new contact list

As  you can see, it’s pretty different than the previous one! And, I hope, better too A lot of the stuff is customizable! The display pictures can be shown in various sizes or hidden; the contacts can be organized by groups, by online and offline, or mixed (that is, you see the groups with only online contacts, and the Offline group with all the rest, as you can do in WLM). And there’s more!

This is the new Chat window:

New Chat window

This one has received so much love that you would feel sick if you had read the list of commits First of all, the dreaded Sidebar is gone for good – but who wants can enable nice dock panels which do the same thing. For the rest of the crowd, there’s the nice Editors with the little buttons on the bottom:

Emoticon Editor

Ink Drawing Editor

Yes you can draw! At the moment it’s not completely compatible with WLM, it won’t work in 1-on-1 chats, but we’re working on it! (maybe before 2.0…also, see point 2 of this post!)  The square box in the emoticon editor is a live preview of the emoticon

Apart from these obvious changes, a ton of stuff was changed under the hood. We now fully support offline messaging. KMess can properly show MSN Plus! color tags, like [b]bold[/b], everywhere (or strip them away, which is the default). You can send, receive and manage custom emoticons with real ease. File transfers are really fast as always (and you can now choose which router ports KMess will need to be open for file transfers!). Accounts management is pretty easier now, too! We use KDE4′s Solid to retrieve network status (but we can cope with its absence). We use KDE4′s pretty notifications for everything – including network errors. KMess now automatically reconnects after a network loss, and is able to save your passwords securely within your KDE Wallet (and of course, if you don’t use it, kmess won’t).

This was just a little starter – the main course will be a nifty visual guide with everything, and it’ll come soon, after the beta release!

2. LibISF

To solve the problem of handwriting messages not working perfectly between us and WLM, we recently started working on a Qt-only library which will be able to encode and decode Microsoft’s once-proprietary format for storing brush strokes.

It will be released under the Lesser GPL license (LGPL) and will really be handy for whoever will need means of loading and saving input from touch-sensitive devices. And maybe also exchanging it with other devices, of course.

Its main features will be conversion from ISF to GIF format and better, to proper data structures (representing brush strokes) which can be used to interpret or show an image off them. It will also be able to transform strokes into ISF data blocks. Being development right at the start, we actually don’t know the direction it’ll take, so I can’t exclude that more features will come

It is already available on our SVN at https://kmess.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kmess/trunk/libisf .

Please, help us with it! You can contact us via the KMess Board, or via email, or via MSN (amroth at coldshock dot net).

asd.gif

This, lo and behold, is the first custom emoticon ever sent by a KMess client

I’ve worked really hard on this improvement – I’m an emoticon junkie. I can’t resist. I put emoticons on almost every message I write. I find them very useful to clarify the tone of what you’re writing, and the standard MSN emoticons – even the KMess ones! – just can’t beat the expressivity of an animated picture chosen by yourself!

It allows the user to have a custom set of emoticons for every account. So, for example, you can have an account for your work contacts with serious custom emoticons, and one for your friends and family, with a lot of funny emoticons.

Right now it’s fairly complete: but there still are a couple things that have need of a good ol’ revision before I can “consider it done”. So please, take everything I say and every image you’ll see below, as only work-in-progress drafts. No guarantee that this will be the final look of it – nor even the way it’ll work!

Managing the current emoticons is a breeze. Here’s the Emoticon Settings dialog:

Look Ma! I’ve got a ton of them!

You can rename in place the emoticons, and remove them by selecting and clicking the Remove button. Couldn’t be easier, isn’t it! I was really surprised to find out how simple had been to create the whole dialog, and to make it work.. in like, 10 minutes?, i had read the documentation and written the first code down. And it worked. Flawlessly. I swear, never saw anything simple as Qt.

But let’s go on… There’s an “Add new…” button, too, right? Here’s what appears when you click it:

KISS style

The dialog is live, so you’ll know you’ve inserted a valid image because it will be showed in the area with the KMess logo. The Ok button will enable only when it’s all ready to go, with an image and a shortcut for it. This was a little harder to realize how to make it. Thanks a lot to the KDE documentation team!

Finally, there’s the chat window. This will probably suffer the most modifications, since it’s more than a draft. it’s a pre-pre-pre-alpha ok? You’ve been warned. ^__^

Very very ugly, very very alpha chat window

It’s a mess. I’m still trying to find a better way to put the custom emoticons panel in… and there’s also the issue of that stupid sidebar which doesn’t have a scrollbar… the most annoying thing currently in KMess, I say. As a relative newbie to programming, I couldn’t find a way to make it work (yet).

Now that I’ve let you have a sneak peek at the mere looks of it, let’s talk about the internal gears and pinions which compose the emoticons system in KMess. Feel free to skip this part
Internally KMess works out the emoticon themes as other clients (most notably Kopete) do, that is, with XML definition files. They contain the picture file names of the emoticons, and for each one of them, they also contain the shortcuts which translate into it.

As with the current versions of KMess, the standard emoticons set gets updated if you choose another one; you can select a Kopete theme and only the MSN icons that the new theme contains will replace the standard KMess theme. I’ve replicated this feature so it continues work notwithstanding the fact that the underlying code is almost completely changed

In related news, that now you can also load themes with GIF, MNG, JPG images. But be warned, it’s quite certain that Windows Live Messenger won’t be able to view your shiny MNG animated emoticons. Sorry

Also, a new emoticon manager takes care of exchanging, loading, modifying emoticon sets at your command, and will automatically guess the file type of your images. Getting that system to work was the most challenging task. Three classes define emoticons (Emoticon), collections of emoticons (EmoticonTheme), and emoticon management (EmoticonManager); i find them to be working well, though I’m still waiting for Diederik’s opinion There are *without any doubt* still some bugs or things that will need rewriting.. but it’s a matter of time!

Gotta go now.. I’ll probably post again about this new feature, so check back here sometimes