LeechCraft

Last couple of weeks was dedicated to Poshuku OnlineBookmarks. Thanks Oleg Linkin aka magog for all his work on that plugin.
DZhon also did a lot to make LeechCraft more buildable and manageable on Windows. He contributed some Windows-related fixes to LeechCraft as well. Lots of thanks as well :)

• Reworked Poshuku OnlineBookmarks: it's almost rewritten from scratch. Particularly, it now supports its own plugins, and exact bookmark services are implemented as plugins. Currently supported services are Read It Later and Del.icio.us.
• Implemented Azoth OTRoid for supporting Off-The-Record messaging system in Azoth.
• Initial work on Choroid, our nice image viewer.
• Aggregator now queues updates of feeds instead of updating them all at once: no more lags on update!
• Allow one to set password in account configuration dialog in Azoth, closes #403.
• Last Activity is now set properly in Azoth Xoox.
• Azoth Xoox now respects lack of support for XEP-0085 in other clients.
• Azoth now sends directed chat state participation events.
• Lots of small fixes in Azoth and Azoth Xoox.
• Fixed a rare though possible segfault on exit in Azoth Chathistory.
• Lots of Win32-related improvements.

We are getting closer to the feature freeze, thus the list of new features shrinks for each new digest. Nevertheless, since the 0.4.90 milestone there are quite a few new features:

• Support for XEP-0055: Jabber Search in Azoth Xoox.
• Support for portocols that allow searching in Azoth.
• Experimental support for XEP-0084: User Avatar in Azoth Xoox (including publishing the avatar).
• User's avatar in the chat tab in Azoth.
• Stubs for sync support in Aggregator.
• Fixed torrents not being added correctly sometimes in BitTorrent.
• Kludges for incorrect registration forms in Azoth Xoox from various servers, mostly ejabberd.
• Change status to XA instead of DND in Azoth Autoidler.
• Various fixes in Azoth Xoox.
• Allow to disable avatars in Azoth p100q.
• Hints for different buttons in Azoth p100q.

LeechCraft milestone 0.4.90 "Stay the Course" is released!

As we move towards the 0.5.0 release, our releases get more tested and with less new features. Sorry us, that will change back again after the 0.5.0 release :)

So, some new hot features for this release:

• Nicer tray notifier in AdvancedNotifications.
• Support for metacontacts in the Azoth IM.
• Support for new XEPs to Azoth Xoox: XEP-0027 (OpenPGP) and XEP-0144 Roster Item Exchange.
• Azoth core now understands encrypted chat sessions (like with OpenPGP), sharing contacts, and such, to make the new things from the previous item usable.
• Azoth Acetamide now supports autojoin, bookmarks and autoidentify.
• /say and /msg commands in Acetamide.
• Support for configuring channels in Azoth Acetamide.
• Azoth Xoox can now be used to update own vCards as well.
• Support marking items as "Important" in Aggregator.
• Lots of optimizations and fixes in Poshuku CleanWeb: particularly, Flash can be blocked again.
• Optimized and fixed quite a few things in Aggregator BodyFetch.
• Fixed chat window styling in Azoth: more Adium styles are now handled correctly.

Of course, this is a brief list of changes. As always, you can read more detailed overviews of the new features in the corresponding digests: #10, #11 and #12.

Packages for Ubuntu Lucid, Maverick, Natty and Oneiric would hopefully be available in a few hours, as well as ebuilds in the official Gentoo portage. Windows build is also coming.

Stay tuned!

Last week (more or less) in LeechCraft:

• Added autoidentify feature to Azoth Acetamide.
• Azoth now supports for protocols that allow exchanging contacts.
• Implemented XEP-0144: Roster Item Exchange to Azoth Xoox.
• Allow one to set different themes for normal chats and multiuser conferences.
• Added quite nice GoneDark theme to Azoth AdiumStyles's default themes set.
• Fixed styling in Azoth and Azoth AdiumStyles: now more Adium themes are interpreted correctly.
• New accounts in Azoth can now be created from the Azoth menu.
• Fixed several bugs in Azoth Acetamide and Azoth.
• Win32 build fixes for BitTorrent.

We haven't published development digests for almost a month, since we mostly did administrative issues, like getting into Gentoo repos, and such. Nevertheless, there is a bunch of changes:

• Acetamide now supports configuring channels, including chanmods, banlist, except list and invite list.
• Added support for /say command in Acetamide.
• Support the "Important" tags for items in Aggregator.
• Frames with ads are also hidden now in Poshuku CleanWeb.
• Added support for running external commands in AdvancedNotifications.
• Speed up Aggregator BodyFetch by orders of magnitude by caching scripts.
• Disable unneeded things like JavaScript or images in Aggregator BodyFetch when parsing downloaded web pages.
• Added KeepAllTags() getter in Aggregator BodyFetch supported scripting API.
• Poshuku CleanWeb now supports the third-party attribute in filter lists.
• Optimized Poshuku CleanWeb a bit: plain strings are matched using plain string matching algorithms instead of wildcard matching.
• Allow to load default rules set in AdvancedNotifications.
• Finally AdvancedNotifications is considered stable enough for the save procedure to be uncommented.
• Draw own avatar and protocol icon in Azoth's contact list.
• Automatically fix channel names in Acetamide by prepending # if it's not present.
• Support /leave command in Azoth.
• Added "Quote" action in Azoth.
• Show free space in BitTorrent when adding files.
• Moved data processing back to main thread in Aggregator BodyFetch, thus some thread-related bugs in QtWebKit don't occur anymore.
• A whole class of bugs has been fixed, when an object mentioned in a notification was already deleted by the time the user activates the notificaton.
• Handle self vcards correctly in Azoth Xoox.
• Correctly handle content resend errors in Poshuku.
• Some micro improvements in Azoth: dynamically detect rename ability, respect lack of MUC support in protocols, don't suggest registering with "Metacontacts" protocol.
• Fixed support for notifying about each conference message from Azoth in AdvancedNotifications.
• Fixed handling of the Ctrl+C shortcut in Azoth.
• Fixed FlashOnClick in Poshuku CleanWeb.
• Fixed ordering of links in Azoth p100q.
• Fixed dependencies calculation in Core.
• Optimized contact list delegate in Azoth.
• Lots of fixes in Acetamide.
• Show localized plugin descriptions in Core plugin manager.
• Migrated to new signal/slot-style hooks in Core.
• Initial support for Qt 4.8.

Plugins for site mirroring (Otzerkalu) and libvlc-based media player are also in progress, but they are currently not merged in the master branch. And maybe the first one, Otzerkalu, would be in the 0.5 release.

We've also begun considering implementing the VFS and dashboard in LeechCraft. But unfortunately since current support for VFS implementations in Qt is declared deprecated and nothing has been proposed instead, the VFS development is currently halted.

While it's all clear what VFS should be, things are a bit more complicated with the dashboard. The best analogue of it among the already-existing and stable projects is possibly KDE's Plasma workspace. What we are currently thinking about is a plugin that allows to open tabs populated with different widgets written in either QML or plain-old-good C++ (or, of course, Python and other scripting languages supported by LC). There will be a whole news item dedicated to dashboard things soon.