Unity support

And there it is, support for the shiny new Unity Launcher available in Ubuntu 11.04+. You can now quit emesene by using the quicklist, and you'll never miss a message again, because the launcher will alert you and show the number of messages you haven't read yet.

Have fun!

Sven

emesene 2.11.5

So, developers have worked hard this month, and here we come with the new and shiny release: emesene 2.11.5!

look ma' i'm running the latest emesene version!

If you already tried/used the previous emesene-2 version (2.11.4), here's a small and readable changelog between the .4 release and this that tries to cover the tons of git commits we had this month:


- Experimental Qt4 gui (disabled by default: if you want to try it, run emesene with the -e main:qt4_main flag, and make sure to have python-qt4 around)
- Better support for Adium themes, including emoticon themes!
- Better working group chat
- Drag and drop support in chat window
- Ctrl+Tab support for switching tabs
- MSN groups chats support when using Adium themes
- Updated translations
- Lots of other bug fixes (so much we forgot about them? we fixed more than 100 user-reported issues!)

Thanks to all developers, translators, casual contributors, users, spammers, haters.
We hope our effort will be useful and appreciated, and that this new release will raise the interest in order to make the emesene ecosystem and community more powerful and capable of making the best instant messaging client you can think of!

Downloads incoming, check the dowloads page!
Source package (extract and run): zipball or tarball


p.s. unfortunately we haven't been able to have some fixes to the python-papyon library committed upstream, we recommend to stick with the 0.5.5 version and upgrade as soon as the 0.5.6 version comes out (we don't know when, unfortunately).

emesene gets a Qt4 gui

Gabriele "Whisky" Visconti a while ago started writing a Qt4 gui extension for emesene (yes, through our nifty extensions it is actually possible to support multiple gui toolkits) and today i'm here to say that i put his great work into emesene/master so that all our git users can try it and maybe improve it/help him fix stuff!

Actually, launching emesene with the Qt4 gui is really easy:
- install pyqt (debian/ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python-qt4)
- get a copy of emesene from git (so you'll be updated enough)
- run emesene: emesene -e main:qt4_main

Beware! This code is still a draft far behind the GTK+ one but it's a great start if you like Qt..and emesene of course (hint: almost-native look in every plaform anyone?). It is not meant for everyday use (yet?), but hacking on it should be real fun.

What are you waiting for? Just pull and updated copy of emesene-git and start hacking!

emesene development continues (!)

me (c10ud) calling my friend (Homer) from my Ubuntu box

That's it, i got this (for those wondering: audio/video calls) sort of working. Of course this is not in emesene-2.11.4 for obvious reasons, but i enabled the thing in latest git HEAD (if you're using emesene from git, you know what i'm talking about).

Before you start crying and celebrating, here's some things you may need to know (quot.):


- only receiving is supported (so if you start a call, you'll only see (hear) the other party)

- tested only in local LAN with latest Windows XP's Live Messenger (so no strange network configurations or NATs or strange clients or whatever)

- will only work with papyon>=0.5.5, python-gstreamer and where X11 is available (due to the use of XIDs, not sure how to do this in other platforms)

- we (as emesene-team) are not interested in this feature, so we are not really pushing it, just showing users it's possible to do it. If you think you can complete/fix it, just do it and everyone will be happy (and we will integrate your fixes in emesene, of course!). Basic receiving seems to be working, efforts must be concentrated in the gstreamer part of sending audio/video and a nice gui around webcam/microphone configuration.

Everyone not interested, just have fun with the great 2.11.4 release! (HINT: Official stable PPA coming soon for non-natty users!)

I'll close this post with a quotation from the great book of emesene:

"..and then thee'll have audio/video calls,
  but thou shalt not annoy thy developers."
    -- c10ud, the book of emesene 2:11-5

emesene 2.11.4 released!

It's been a while since we last released a new version of emesene.


Frankly speaking, the good old emesene 1 was really awesome but a burden to mantain since it grew without following a precise path. It served our messaging needs since 2006 (who said girlfriends?), and it's been a long road since (Luis) Mariano first published his little project on teh internets.

Now, after two years of intense developing from scratch here comes the new version of our favourite (not-only) msn client; stabler, nicer, faster, stronger (?)

Impatient?

If you're an hardcore user, just download the emesene-2.11.4 tarball or zipball.

Windows user? The installer executable will arrive soon.
OSX Snow Leopard user can try this experimental dmg package.

As for GNU/Linux distributions, you'll find emesene-2.11.4 in Debian Testing and Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (enable natty-proposed repository), other distributions will probably come up to a solution on their own (hello Arch!). Let us know how you packaged emesene and we'll tell users!

Techy details, you won't need these in order to start chatting:

emesene2 design permits to keep the code clean and simple while allowing any sort of extension of the core functionalities.

As an example, please notice you can now also connect with Facebook Chat, GTalk or any other XMPP/Jabber network through the python-xmpppy extension. You won't have the same features you'll get connecting to the Live Messenger network, but if you can get your friends switch to a free(-er?) network, you can keep emesene (of course if you like it!)

Another example is that if you have python-webkit bindings you will get a really nice adium-like output for your chat, if not it will fall back to the default output implementation using gtk's TextView.

The nice thing about this is that you can write your replacement for any part of emesene (even the complete ui!) so if you don't like something, just override the default extension, load it, spread it, and if it's awesome enough we may include it. This allows a great degree of customization and to base discussions on working code, if some feature has more than one option then both can be available as extensions.

As for the Live Messenger network, the "papylib" extension will take care of it automagically through the great python-papyon library, the same as Empathy's (GNOME's instant messenger).

The nice bonuses of using this library over the usual self-made one are: complete p2p support, msnp18, great address book and msn profile handling. Being so widespread allows you, the user, to get the latest 0day fixes from your favourite distro (if you're using GNU/Linux of course) and new features as soon as we plug them into emesene.

The gui is done in GTK with pygtk, but ofcourse you can provide your own interface using . Just remember emesene and its protocol libraries need python 2 (>= 2.6), so no py3k or similar (for now ;).

Enough said.
Happy chatting,
the emesene team

UPDATE: added OSX links and emesene in Ubuntu 11.04 in natty-proposed repo.