We have done some changes to our KDE Telepathy repositories recently, that might be interesting for packagers.
We have consolidated all Plasma applets into a single repository called ktp-desktop-applets (originally ktp-contact-applet). The ktp-presence-applet repository is now empty, the master branch contains just a README, the stable branch kde-telepathy-0.5 is preserved.
We have also normalized names of the applets, so they are now called org.kde.ktp-presence, org.kde.ktp-chat, org.kde.ktp-contactlist and org.kde.ktp-contact. The ktp-desktop-applets installs an update script for Plasma Desktop that will automatically update user configuration on next login.
All declarative plugins are now located in ktp-common-internals, so that all our QML models and utils are available for developers.
These changes will be first available in 0.6 release.
Every year Red Hat Czech offers a list of topics for bachelor and diploma theses to students from local universities. The topics are usually suggested and posted by Red Hat employees who then work with the students as technical consultants and mentors.
We see this as a good opportunity for students to learn about open source software, communities and collaboration and for us to find potential future employees :-) (so there’s a great motivation too). We want students not to see their diploma or bachelor thesis as some boring obligation, but rather a “fun” way to learn new things, meet people and gain experience. And last but not least they are potential contributors to the projects they are involved in.
This year I managed to get several students I’m mentoring to pick a topic related to KDE. Although all projects are somehow related to KDE Telepathy, it’s a good start ;-)
Today I want to introduce work of first two students, Stanislav Láznička and Artur Dębski.
Makneto++
Stanislav Láznička is doing his bachelor thesis on Brno University of Technology. His topic is “Shared Board - Makneto”, more specifically, his task is to port Makneto to Telepathy. Makneto is a whiteboard-sharing application for KDE, similar to KWhiteboard. It has been written some time ago as a diploma thesis. Since then several students have based their theses on this project (not all of them successfully though). Stanislav is now researching how to use the Telepathy framework and preparing to start the actual port soon. If you are interested in further progress, follow his blog and his git repo on bitbucket.
KTp Active
Artur Dębski (IRC: mentero), a student from Silesian University of Technology in Poland. His topic is “Touch interface for KDE Telepathy”. Yes, hang on to your hat, we are going to have a totally awesome Plasma Active application for Instant Messaging. Artur has written an extensive blogpost about his work together with some mockups. You can checkout the existing code from here, there’s already a demo app to play with!
What is your excuse for still using Kopete instead of KDE Telepathy? Oh, you can’t live without your old conversation logs? Not a problem anymore!
KDE Telepathy is now able to import your AIM, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber or GaduGadu logs from Kopete into Telepathy logger.
When you add a new account in the Accounts KCM, we will convert the new account ID into Kopete account ID and check, whether there are any logs in Kopete folder for this account. And if there are, we ask you whether you want to import them or not.
Import Kopete logs for a new account?
That’s nice, right? But what about our current users, who just silently weep, longing for their old Kopete logs? Well, we thought about them, too! After starting the KDE IM Log Viewer, you will be prompted with initial logs import dialog. The dialog will appear only once. Whether you click “Import Logs” or “Cancel”, we won’t bother you with this never again. Currently I’m considering adding a main menu to the log viewer, which would contain an action to invoke this dialog again, in case you accidentally click “Cancel” for instance.
Initial Kopete logs import diaog
When you are removing an existing account from KDE Telepathy, you are prompted the “Are you sure you want to remove the account?” dialog. As a bonus, I have enriched it by a “Remove conversations logs” checkbox. Guess what will happen if you check it ;)
Remove account confirmation dialog can now clear logs too
All these features will be available in KDE Telepathy 0.6.
And as usually, we are still looking for new contributors! There are some junior jobs in the bugzilla, which are a perfect start for newcomers. If you would need any help with fixing these bugs or wishes, just come talk to us on #kde-telepathy IRC channel or mailing lists.
On Akademy I made a few patches for KDE Telepathy text-ui and logviewer. I continued even after Akademy, and David though it would be a good idea to make a maintainer of the KDE Telepathy LogViewer (thank you David! :) ). As a new maintainer I decided to kill all bugs, implement all feature requests and add a few of my own improvements to make the LogViewer rock.
So let’s see how the LogViewer will look like in KTp 0.5 :-)
Nicknames and Accounts
The logviewer tries to retrieve real names (or nicknames) of the contacts, so that you can easily identify the person (and you don’t have to remember who john123456789@gmail.com is). Unfortunately the names can be obtained only when you are online. When you account is disconnected, you will just see the ugly usernames. Also the list was converted into a tree, where contacts are grouped by your accounts. You can filter the contacts either by their username of display name, too.
Plan is to have the same (similar) view as in Contact List (with fancy look and avatars).
Navigating between Conversations
Usually you only remember the contact in whose logs to read, but you don’t remember whether you should be looking to logs from yesterday, the day before or last week. Searching for valid dates in the date picker is not always comfortable. So logviewer now automatically inserts a links to previous and next conversations to the beginning and end of each log to make jumping between them easier.
Global Search
If your memory is as bad as mine, you usually just remember a single word or term, but you have no idea who and when sent you it. Then use global search! The contacts view is filtered to contain only contacts that have at least one conversation with matching terms. Only matching conversations are displayed in the date picker and the searched term is highlighted in the message view so that you can spot it more easily.
Future?
I have some cool plans for future, some of them will make it to 0.5, some will have to wait. Here’s what you can be looking forward to:
file transfer logging - Alin suggested that file transfers are part of conversation history and thus information about it should be stored in the logs as well., including link to the downloaded file. I agree and if I find out how to do it, I’ll add it to the logviewer :-)
better date picker - searching for conversation dates in the date picker can be quite painful if you don’t remember the exact date or when you chat with some person only rarely, so I’d like to introduce some better UI for listing past conversations (maybe just a list of dates…)
that’s all I can remember right now, but there will be more. I have some ideas for the text-ui as well, so stay tuned ;-)
Yesterday I have switched from Kopete to KDE Telepathy. At first I only wanted to see what’s new, but I was quite
impressed and I didn’t see any problem that would keep me from using KDE Telepathy instead of Kopete. Except for one - a
contact runner. I’m an incredibly lazy creature and instead of having to remember various shortcuts or even touching
mouse, I rather use KRunner for nearly everything, including starting chat with my IM contacts.
In the true spirit of open source, instead of whining about a missing feature I decided to take an action and write the
plugin myself :)
Same as with Kopete Contacts runner, just by typing name of your contact will display matching contacts in KRunner. If
you have one contact in multiple accounts, it will display the contact multiple times, with name of the account as well.
The results are sorted by presence, e.g. if a person is online on Jabber, but offline on GTalk, the Jabber contact will
be listed first.
If the contact has capabilities for audio or video call, file transfer or desktop sharing, you will see multiple
buttons. By default, just by hitting Enter on the selected contact will start text chat, but by clicking on one of the
buttons you can start the respective action. If the other side does not have some capability, it’s button will not be
displayed.
If you want to explicitly start for example an audio call, typing “audiocall John” will list all contacts named John
capable of audio call and clicking on it or hitting Enter will start an audio call immediately. Similarly there are
commands “videocall”, “sendfile” and “sharedesktop” for respective actions.
This last feature is untested though, because none of my contacts seem to use KDE Telepathy or have any capability other
than text chat :D
Here is some artificially made screen shot :)
(Ignore the KSnapshot icon, I had already removed all the code to generate this preview when I noticed it :D )
You can get sources from my scratch repo on KDE git:
