In this release we’ve mostly focused on the LMP and NetStoreManager modules, but other modules also got some interesting improvements. Also, it’s time to announce the Monocle reader!
LMP
LMP, our music player, now has all proper logic for uploading songs to cloud services, playing back uploaded songs, as well as, for example, fetching playlists from such services. Support for exact clouds is added via modules, in accordance with LeechCraft way, and for now only MP3tunes.com service is supported. Since the foundation is already laid, adding other clouds like Google Music would be much easier.
Much like with device synchronization, one can also transcode the songs before uploading:
As one may see from this screenshot there is now a nice stats label below the playlist, so that one can know exactly how much songs he added and their total play time.
Regarding playlist improvements, there are now different sort modes, so that one can now sort, for example, by file path or disable sorting at all. If the sorting is disabled, then it’s possible to move and reorder tracks around with Drag’n’Drop, and the order of tracks addition is preserved as tracks are added.
Among cosmetic changes are fixed background colors in QML elements and optional ignoring of “The” when sorting artists in collection. This way The Autumn Offering will be between August Burns Red and Behold… The Arctopus. And shortcuts for different actions are configurable now, too.
The newer LMP also supports recently released liblastfm-1.0 which broke API compatibility with liblastfm-0.3.
NetStoreManager
NetStoreManager got initial support for the Google Drive cloud storage service:
Its core has been reworked so now it can easily support other similar cloud storage services like Yandex.Disk. For now only uploading and fetching the list of already uploaded files works, but in the next milestone it’d have the rest of features, as well as automatic folder synchronization.
Since the original Yandex.Narod doesn’t fit the new idea of NetStoreManager, its support will be removed after this milestone and replaced with Yandex.Disk.
Monocle
Though being available for some months already, this module only matured now enough to be announced. So, meet Monocle: our document reader. It already has quite enough features to use it on a daily basis for most tasks. It supports displaying one page or double-page spread, copying selection to image or text, scaling, width and height fitting, tables of contents, links, paginated navigation and printing. Monocle also integrates with the rest of LeechCraft so that it automatically opens a PDF document after a link to it is clicked, for example, in a browser or Azoth, and the document is downloaded.
Different formats are supported via different backend moudles, and for now only PDF and fb2 file formats are supported. There are two backends for PDF and one hand-written fb2 implementation.
PDF is supported either via Poppler library or through mupdf library. The later is discouraged, since the mupdf backend supports not all features that are supported by Poppler backend, but that may be fixed some time in the future. And it is built as a static library, so some magic is required to make it work in LeechCraft. For example, see this bugreport.
The main reasoning behind adding mupdf backend is that some claim it renders text much better than Poppler, but that’s questionable.
Azoth
Azoth IM client also got its fair share of improvements.
A new plugin has been added, Azoth BirthdayNotifier, which notifies about birthdays of contacts in user’s contact list. The dates are taken from contacts’ vCards, so this feature obviously relies on them being properly filled out.
Azoth Xtazy now supports /np and /sharesong commands. /np pastes the name of the currently played song into current chat, while /sharesong uploads the song via plugins like NetStoreManager and pastes a link to it. The former works with both LMP and MPRIS players, the latter requires LMP only. This can be seen as yet one example of profits of LeechCraft architecture and integration.
Azoth now finally displays user’s avatar in tooltips:
Moreover, tabs of conferences with unread highlight messages are now marked with a star sign (“*”).
QXmpp, the XMPP implementation library forked by us, has been synced with the upstream. And seems like we’re a bit closer to integrating our custom patches to QXmpp with the upstream version. Integrating means less mess, more chances to get into Debian repos, and is good and healthy for the Open Source community — why fork when we can cooperate? :)
Other modules
Aggregator now supports exporting feeds to PDF in addition to previously supported fb2. One can adjust the parameters of PDF export, like margins, fonts and font sizes, and paper size. The resulting PDFs are perfect for reading on eBooks like Amazon Kindle.
The issue reporter Dolozhee now supports fetching issue categories from our tracker during issue reporting. This way one can assign a category to the issue being reporterd right from Dolozhee interface.
Of course, there was a bunch of other improvements, so don’t forget to check out our development digests if you’re interested: #28 and #29.
Packages and builds for supported distros and OSes will be available soon. Watch your package manager or our download page! The source archive is already available.