KMess 2 is coming on quite different from what I had initially thought. I was thinking at it just as a more free playground where to shove all the features I could read in Trac or imagine myself… but it’s more. As I continue fixing the last very small
problems in the code, I keep finding points where we could just throw away some old code – and create something better, faster, prettier instead.

I’m quite excited about the possibilities Qt4 and KDE4 are giving us, and I’m already exploring some of them, like a new contact list with a much improved style, for example. That’s just one example out of many since, as I said above, there’s a lot of room for improvement here and there, simply too much to list!

The downside in all this fertile ground, is that we’re alone seeding it. KMess has always been a small project; but this time, I’m feeling way more limited than when I was contributing for the 1.5 release, because of this. With all the thing we could do now that we have an incredibly powerful set of tools, some excellent network code, and a stable program, we can’t start rethinking everything from scratch because we’re so little developers. This sucks.

However, I’d continue improving KMess even if I was alone!

Regarding the project status, we’re still porting. But now, we’re almost done: here’s a screen grab of the SVN version!

There are still a couple glitches with file transfer, the contact list is still plain ugly, and the resource locator isn’t working correctly, but it’s almost done. I hope to be able to finish the port this week… then we’ll be able to start the real innovation

I hope I’ll be able to post here usability polls, sneak peeks at new features, and whatever I’ll think of, to try enhancing our messaging client… Cya soon!