We haven’t published any development digests since LeechCraft 0.4.95, and it’s time to fill the gap, since the first milestone of the new 0.6.x series, LeechCraft 0.5.60 “Hibernating Reason”, is released today!
So, since 0.4.95 we’ve introduced a bunch of new plugins. Most importantly, the following protocol plugins have been added to Azoth:
- Astrality, our Telepathy abstraction layer. Particularly, it allows to use protocols provided by libpurple via the telepathy-haze connection manager, like ICQ, AIM, Gadu-gadu, Yahoo and a bunch of others.
- Vader, an implementation of the Mail.Ru Agent protocol. It currently supports extended statuses, sending SMS, attention requests, user tune, message delivery receipts, mailbox notifications and other features of the protocol.
- Zheet, for the MSN protocol. It supports pretty much the same features.
The Sidebar plugin has been added. It displays a sidebar with actions for quickly opening new tabs, and it also displays currently opened tabs and allows to switch between them. If there are more than three tabs of some kind (like web browser tabs), they are folded into single action to avoid cluttering up the sidebar. It also incorporates something like a tray area, where other plugins may embed their actions or status icons. It is planned that some day Sidebar would supersede our current tabbar.
One of such plugins that embed actions into Sidebar is our new power manager plugin, Liznoo. It displays battery status in Sidebar’s tray, and it also detects when computer goes to sleep or resumes and notifies other plugins about these events. This way Azoth can gracefully close connections to servers on hibernating and resume just as gracefully when returning from sleep. Liznoo also supports displaying history of battery charge and power consumption as well as notifications about low battery charge. It also allows user to make the machine go to sleep mode or hibernation.
Session management is now centralized and performed by the TabSessManager plugin. This means in near future even things like Azoth chat tabs will be recovered on LeechCraft start. Global centralized tab unclose manager is also on its way. TabSessManager also supports explicitly named sessions, so that one can save a bunch of interesting tabs in a named session and restore them later.
NetStoreManager, plugin for management of remote network data storages like Yandex.Disk, has been added. It is modular, and for now only Yandex.Disk is supported. NetStoreManager allows to upload files easily from LeechCraft, it maintains a list of uploaded files and allows to prolongate them (if the service supports it).
Some other important changes:
- There is an API level check now when loading plugins, so no more segfaults because of plugins for previous LeechCraft versions!
- Azoth Acetamide, our IRC protocol plugin, plugin got a lot of improvements. Particularly, it now has a menu for CTCP operations, and user info is supported.
- Azoth Xoox, the XMPP protocol plugin, now allows to add download tasks remotely via the Ad-Hoc Commands XEP. It also got support for message forwarding. It also doesn’t request vCards and versions in MUCs via gateways anymore. Support for emails and phones in vCard dialog was also added.
- Aggregator now updates its feeds in a separate thread. No more freezes on update! Marking whole channels as read or unread is also performed in a separate thread.
- Added importers from Psi+, Vacuum and Kopete to New Life.
- A bunch of fixes in Azoth AdiumStyles, so the support for themes is almost fully compliant now. Themes like Renkoo or Satin look really nice!
- Tabs pinning has been moved to a separate plugin — Pintab.
- Added GActs, a plugin for global shortcut management, so Azoth now finally has a global shortcut for viewing next unread message.
- LeechCraft now uses global system iconsets instead of carrying one with it. Oxygen or KFaenza are recommended!
Among other changes:
- Added Poshuku Pogooglue plugin for quick googling of selected text.
- Added Azoth Keeso plugin for morphing text InTo soMeTHiNg lIKe ThIS.
- Caching in the Resource Loader framework, which should dramatically reduce amount of HDD accesses in plugins like Azoth.
- Azoth now understands protocols where a user may have more than one permission of the same role in a MUC at a time.
- Azoth Xoox now requests software versions for roster items and MUC participants.
- A bit reworked UI of Azoth.
- Shortcuts for quoting and clearing chat window are now exposed.
- Azoth now has its own fonts configurator.
- More configurable shortcuts everywhere.
- A bunch of protocol and behavior fixes in Azoth, Azoth Acetamide and Azoth Xoox.
- Fixed self-presence and self-PEP-events handling in Azoth Xoox.
- Fixed auto upload/download in Poshuku OnlineBookmarks.
- Moved to C++11, so that LeechCraft can only be built now with gcc 4.5 or later or MSVS 2010 (though, the latter doesn’t support a couple of plugins). clang isn’t supported yet.
You can also check out the roadmap for this version for more bug reports and feature requests that were implemented in this release!
Source tarball is already available on SourceForge. Packages for supported distros will be available soon.