KMess 2.0 is (finally!) out
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):
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- 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!
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 @ 03:20 
Generally KMess
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July 26th, 2009 at 03:50
Hmmmmm!
Honestly, I’d expected to read something about “WHAT” KMess is all about within the first 1-2 lines… So far I read.. Development over 1.5 years… Screenshots…. Distros should include it… then I stopped reading (or viewing over it)…. Now what exactly is KMess for those, who come here on P.K.O every now and then…
July 26th, 2009 at 03:58
Great !
One downside is that the icon kinda sucks don’t you think ? :p
July 26th, 2009 at 04:07
I like KMess, but there are more features missing.
WebCam support?
Thank you.
July 26th, 2009 at 04:12
@Sammy: you could have seen it from the screenshots (chat app) and the website was being linked to as well. But fyi: it’s a MSN/MS Live Messenger (or whatever they call it these days) client.
July 26th, 2009 at 04:31
“25 readers!” –> you know you’re on planet KDE don’t you
Thank you for your hard work, you and all the kmess team !
July 26th, 2009 at 05:32
You should seriously consider moving the visual guide to Userbase to increase discoverability.
July 26th, 2009 at 06:04
Thank you for your hard work, and we waiting webcam support in the 2.1.
July 26th, 2009 at 06:37
Woww. Great Job!
I Hope it’s goign to be included in the next distro releases
OpenSuSE 11.2
Kubuntu Jacklope
Congratulations!
July 26th, 2009 at 07:14
Thank you for developing the best free MSN client. I’ve been using since it was alpha and it’s amazing. The error report system has been very useful and the program is beautiful, easy to use, starts quickly, is stable and works perfect.
Thank you!
July 26th, 2009 at 07:19
I asked for a Fedora package, it’s probably coming to kde-unstable repo:
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fedora-kde/2009-July/003307.html
July 26th, 2009 at 08:15
What about integration with Kopete?
July 26th, 2009 at 08:38
This is a great piece of software! If you use MSN messenger protocol, I recommend that you use this client instead of kopete.
July 26th, 2009 at 09:05
@pinotree:
http://trac.kmess.org/wiki/MSN Protocol Library Ideas
btw: Woohoo! Finally after such hard work
Congratulations to everyone involved in this great release 
July 26th, 2009 at 09:38
This looks great.. I’ve never try this but it looks promising
About the icon, you should consider asking the Oxygen team for a nice icon and maybe other visual stuff.
July 26th, 2009 at 09:54
@ed
> One downside is that the icon kinda sucks don’t you think ? :p
This is on pinheiro’s itch list as well..
He likes to redo our icon, and I’ve been told the hummingbird is quite hard to do right. So, at the moment we use this icon instead to have a reasonably nice oxygen look.
July 26th, 2009 at 09:57
(I should have mentioned that although a new icon will be done I’m quite happy that Michael contributed an icon in Oxygen colors. This is already an improvement over the KDE 3 icon, allowing us to enter the KDE 4 zone without looking out of place)
July 26th, 2009 at 10:21
hello, I have tried Kmess2 today and for the moment, is my new IM, replacing emesene, unfortunately, there are features missing but the program is amazing.
I wish somes features like, best integration with plasma, audio/video support, and more customization. Thanks from Argentina.
July 26th, 2009 at 12:04
Thank you guys, you’re awesome.
July 26th, 2009 at 16:06
[...] KMess 2.0 is (finally!) out 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! [...]
July 26th, 2009 at 21:34
[...] Fuente | KMess’ing [...]
July 27th, 2009 at 00:04
@Sammy:
Ops! And to say that I always complain that people on the planet talk about their stuff assuming the readers know what it’s about…. I will take more care for the next posts, I promise!
@Pol:
What do you mean with “better Plasma integration” ? The other features are definitely coming in the next release
@Maniacmusician:
Quite a good idea, let’s see what can be done
July 27th, 2009 at 07:27
If I used MSN more than just occasionally, I would seriously consider using KMess. From the screenshots it looks quite nice, but, I’m more of a Jabber man myself
July 27th, 2009 at 08:32
What about making KMess available in KDE for Windows Installer? I heard KMess works under Windows too…
July 27th, 2009 at 10:17
Amroth, Sorry for my bad english. I would say something like http://www.notmart.org/images/plasmoidsystray.png in the system tray icon.
Also, the notifications aren’t working very well, thanks anyway.
July 29th, 2009 at 03:04
@POl: That could be an idea for the future, indeed
About the notifications, lately on KDE4.3 they’re behaving somehow badly, but it’s KNotify’s fault, if you try it on 4.2 they should work correctly!
@Diego: Yes, as soon as we will have a decent Windows build!
July 30th, 2009 at 11:44
I just created a Slackware package, but it’s made for my hybrid system (i.e., Slack 12.2 with KDE 4.2.2 on top of it), so it won’t be useful… yet. That will surely change when Slackware goes 13.0. Meanwhile, you can have my SlackBuild should you like it.
This is an excellent MSN client. I am using it right now, and I am having trouble selecting another program for my Jabber client (because I don’t want a multiprotocol one anymore) kudos!
July 30th, 2009 at 12:43
@Eduardo: Why thank you
We’d also love to have a Slackware binary package too; could you do a good one for us? Or, do you know if any big repo is hosting a KMess 2.0 package already?