Integration of a plug-in system into KMess

KMess, the Live/MSN Messenger alternative for Linux, has been growing in
the past years as a way of letting the users feel comfortable with
instant messenger programs by providing a messenger with almost a lot of
the features Windows Live Messenger has together with a nice user
interface (and much more of course ). In order to keep this constant
improvement, the developer team has been working on a plug-in system. It
is a major feature as it allows which allows new features without
bloating KMess.

Goal:
The primary goal of this project is to design and write code in a way
that plugins/scripts can get their full functionality, main control of
the following components is considered:

- Message text editor
- Personal message and status
- Message transfer
- Access to display picture

I will create some demo plugins to show the capabilities of the plugin
system.
This way other plugin developers can see how can be done, so they can
use all their creativity for improving the experience for KMess users.
For the same purpose, appropriate documentation is also required, so
documenting all my efforts is an important part too.

Details:

- Message editor: have control of the text you send to your contacts, as
well as the text you receive from them. There are many possibilities,
but why not play some jokes to friends and something you write your
messages backwards. You know how painful it is to write long sentences
in reverse (let alone read them ). Another, more reasonable, one is
predefined sentences: let the user to choose the trigger-commands and
message to be shown like if you type “>greet” could show “Hi! How are you?”.

- Personal message and status: control of your personal message. A
possible demo plugin is to change the personal message automatically at
certain hours configuring it in a simple window where I can set an
specific personal message or status to be shown at a certain time.

- Messages transfer: control how many people would you like to be able
to receive your message. The demo plugin could be: I would like to ask something to 5
people in private without opening each one of its windows and
writing/copy-pasting the same message 5 times, instead of that how about
selecting the contacts or group(s) you like to send the message(s).

- Display picture: control of the display pictures you show to your
contacts. As a demo, we could set an specific display picture to be
shown at a certain time or to be shown by an interval of time.

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

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!):

The frontend

A screenshot, as usual, is worth a thousand words:

Users can send four types of feedback: things they liked; things they didn’t like; bugs; ideas for features.

The frontend is a set composed by:

• a bar, which automatically moves itself to the current window, with the four icons corresponding to the four feedback types;
• A dialog, which is used to allow the user to compose then send the feedback;
• A “LikeBack” object, which is practically the only thing you’ll have to insert in your code, and allows you to customize how LikeBack will integrate in your application.

Once it is installed (more on this later), the user can use it in two ways. First, by clicking in the Bar icons, a very direct way; and second, by choosing “Send comment to the developers” from the Help menu. Once one of these action is made, the Dialog pops up. The developers can choose the languages they can read, to help the users choose how to write the feedback. Notice the online translator option (linking back to Google Translate)

After writing their comment, the user can choose whether he/she wants to remain anonymous or to be contacted back in case it’s needed. The obligatory privacy statement makes it clear that you developer won’t mess with the collected personal data – which amount to an email, the app’s version number, and which app’s window the feedback was sent from; anonymity or privacy assurance help keeping the user comfortable about telling his/her opinions to you.

Once he/she is done, the Ok button will send an HTTP POST request to your LikeBack installation, somewhere on the Web.

The backend

This is a simple web application, running on any web host with PHP5 and MySQL (you need root shell access to add some neat extras, explained below). Screenshots:

The first screenshot shows how flexible LikeBack is: you can show which bugs types to view or hide, and customize the list however you may wish. The list itself shows a very generous set of details from each ticket, and the line color gives a direct visual key to the feedback types.

In the comment view, easily accessible by clicking on the comment text, you will be able to see an extended form of the ticket list details, along with the commenter’s email (if any). The remarks system is a very powerful way to communicate with the user: it allows to send your remark both to the ticket remarks list, and also to the user email. Using a certain script which must be installed on your mail server, the user will be able to reply him/herself to the remark, establishing a full and direct conversation between you and them. If this is not listening to your user base, what is?

Of course you can delegate LikeBack interaction to specific members of the team, to help keeping focus – we at KMess can get 5 to 20 comments each day, this means you could need to use a significant development time on LikeBack. Trading and sharing burdens between team members is even more important!

Another *great* feature of LikeBack is Trac triaging – you can enter a Trac ticket number, and LikeBack will close the ticket as soon as it is marked as done in Trac, also posting a remark about the event This can be expanded of course, making a Bugzilla interaction plugin is surely not hard!

Installation

How do you get LikeBack up & running? At the time of writing, the best way is checking out the LikeBack SVN; we will soon release version 1.4, which will also be packaged on SourceForge as a tarball.

Here’s the LikeBack SVN repo:

https://kmess.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kmess/trunk/likeback

Installation instructions about the backend are also present in the README file:

1. Install the Smarty library, usually by installing the smarty package on your server’s shell, or by installing it locally on the LikeBack directory (this is not tested at the moment, can you tell us if it works?)
2. Put the Likeback backend/ directory contents in a publicly accessible location, say /likeback/ on your server, or somewhere less accessible/guessable, if you want
3. Restrict access to admin/ by HTTP/HTTPS authentication
4. Copy db.conf.template.php to db.conf.php and modify it with your database’s access details. We recommend, if possible, to use a separate username and password only for LikeBack, with only access to the LikeBack tables
5. Make sure the user that runs all scripts can write to admin/templates/cache
6. Run admin/install.php
7. Optionally, to have LikeBack send weekly reminders to you, add a crontab entry to run cron/sendReminders.php weekly (see cron/crontab file about this)
8. Test your installation!

When it’s ready, move on to the frontend! Copy the frontend/ directory in your source tree. Then we need to add LikeBack to a window: usually, the first QMainWindow which gets shown will be the best place for LikeBack. From the moment it’s enabled, the LikeBack Bar will move to every window or dialog automatically. If you want to add the menu entries to send feedback in other windows, you can instance LikeBack somewhere global, then call likeBack->createActions( actionCollection() ) whenever your other main windows are instanced.

Include the “likeback.h” file. Then, here’s the code to instance and set up LikeBack initially:

1. Instance the LikeBack object:
   LikeBack *likeBack = new LikeBack( LikeBack::AllButtons, true /*showLikeBackBar/ );
   The first argument allows you to choose (with ORed flags) which of the 4 available feedback types you want to enable. The others will not show up anywhere.
   The bool argument allows you to initially show or hide the LikeBack Bar – but the user can override this option with the Help menu checkbox (also added by LikeBack).
2. Then you need to set up where to send the feedback; that is, your server:
   likeBack->setServer( "www.example.org", "/where/you/set/up/likeback/send.php", 80 );
3. You can also choose on which windows the LikeBack bar is allowed to show up:likeBack->setWindowNamesListing( LikeBack::AllWindows );
4. An important line: choosing which languages are known by the development team: at least one of each team members which have access to the LikeBack web interface must know at least one of the language locales you specify here (use the ISO short format in the list):
   likeBack->setAcceptedLanguages( QStringList() << "en" << "nl" << "it" << "de" );
5. Finally, add to your window the LikeBack menu actions:likeBack->createActions( actionCollection() );
   and in your ui.rc file:

   <Menu name="help">
<Action name="likeBackSendComment" />
<Action name="likeBackShowIcons" />
</Menu>

6. If you don’t use a KXmlGuiWindow, but a plain KMainWindow, add the actions like this:KActionCollection *collection = new KActionCollection();
collection->addAssociatedWidget( this );
likeback->createActions( collection );
menu()->addAction( collection->action( "likeBackSendComment" );
menu()->addAction( collection->action( "likeBackShowIcons" );

See, it’s not really hard! And I must assure you – it pays off

History

We didn’t invent LikeBack. We first learned about it from BasKet Note Pads, when KDE 3.5 was on all of our desktops.  We adopted it and, around october 2008, ported it to KDE4 – but only activated it in February 2009. Since then, we have improved it dramatically, and it’s really better than it was before. And we’re not done at all!

Conclusions

We’d like to see LikeBack in a lot of apps! If you have any question feel free to poke us (Valerio Pilo and Sjors Gielen):

• on IRC: #kmess on Freenode
• on our forum: http://www.kmess.org/board/
• via email: project@kmess.org

Thanks for reading

PS. on a funny side, it took 2500+ comments to get our very first insult

«Why, thank you!»

Lovely!

We consider this as a great milestone

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!

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!

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).

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

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

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!