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.
