towards a new release

Some news directly from emesene git master:

• emesene now features an optional single window mode, like skypetab-ng, for all your docking needs
• direct-connect aka fast file transfers are now implemented in papyon, emesene will listen on 6891 (and subsequent, if needed) when receiving and will try to fallback gracefully to slow file transfers in case the bridge fails. Please remember this feature is tied to your network configuration, so if it works or not it doesn't depend entirely on emesene.
• SleekXMPP is now the default library for gtalk, facebook and other xmpp services.
• gtk3 support is now fully in place however some nasty bugs in ubuntu's pygobject prevent us from improving it further. gtk2 will remain the default ui for now.
• updated DEPENDS for packagers: if you package emesene for any OS please take a look at the updated requirements
• some minor new handy features, bugfixes.

We need YOU for testing these features, we'd like to release a new version soon.
And also we need YOU for updating translations so users can enjoy the new emesene in their own language.
If you know python and are willing to help, please fix one issue ;)

emesene development strikes back

Hello there, long time no blog!

Since the lightning-fast 2.12.3 release, the emesene team has been busy fixing bugs and cooking up new features.

Thanks to our friend Jose "pepeleproso" Rostagno you can now enjoy a fully-featured emesene in gtk3 which blends seamlessly in all the bleeding-edge Operative Systems such as Ubuntu 12.04 and Arch.
You just need some gobject-introspection packages (gir-1.2-*, usually installed by default) and if such conditions are met you will get the new gtk3 user interface automagically (and hopefully won't notice anything different from the old one ;)). Please note that gtk3 does NOT mean python3: you still need python2.

Other than that, I integrated and fixed an old patch from Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne which should enable direct file transfers in emesene. Yeah, fast file transfers as in direct connection between you and your buddy.
This is still early stage and tested only in a pretty restricted environment such as "local transfer between emesene and emesene", but the more you test it the better it will become (hopefully, thanks to the feedbacks).

We also have the usual load of bugfixes (msn protocol, gui, facebook..), but this post is more a call for developers and testers to try and partecipate to the development version so we can make the next release better.

As an example, we're looking forward replacing xmpppy with SleekXMPP for the jabber backend. This way we can use a nice and actively mantained fully-featured library for all your GTalk, Facebook and MSN-XMPP (!) needs. Some work has already been done but since we're short on manpower you know what to do: check out the emesene/sleekxmpp branch and start hacking!

Also, the Qt4 user interface has been fixed so it can run but it still isn't on par with the gtk{2,3} one. If you're interested in fixing it so it becomes as awesome as gtks the code lives in the main emesene branch.

If you have any question, just use the usual channels such as mailing lists, google groups, github issues, irc.

That would be all!
Oh, if you only want to test the development version and don't know anything about git, etc. just download a snapshot from HERE

-- Riccardo (c10ud)