Today LeechCraft 0.5.85 “Risen Through The Ashes” is released!

We’ve released LeechCraft 0.5.80 almost two months ago, and we planned to release 0.5.85 somewhere in mid-September, but the changes are worth the delay.

First of all, it’s worth saying in the very beginning that we’ve merged our QXmpp “feature fork” with upstream QXmpp, so upstream version should be used from now on. In fact, our repo on Github is already deleted to avoid confusion. QXmpp 0.7.4 (and hopefully upper) will do for LeechCraft 0.5.85.

Mac OS X

Moreover, LeechCraft can finally be built and run on Mac OS X:

The resulting app bundle is tested on a couple of Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8 machines and seems to work, though the build is very-very experimental (but seems like it’s already much more stable than Windows version). LeechCraft is built using standard toolchain coming with XCode, with the clang compiler.

A new plugin has also been added, Pierre, which deals with Mac OS X integration. For now it only adds a Mac-style menu bar and a button for maximizing LeechCraft into a separate workspace, but more stuff is to come.

And, regarding new plugins, there is Launchy, a new plugin for launching applications and opening LeechCraft tabs. It is UNIX-only and fetches the list of applications from the freedesktop.org desktop files. For now it only supports visual fullscreen launcher, some say it resembles Unity a bit:

CleanWeb

Our AdBlock+-compatible ad blocker, the Poshuku CleanWeb module, was optimized and improved a lot.

First, now CleanWeb supports a much wider subset of AdBlock+ rules, including separator-based rules and selector-based element hiding for those elements that can’t be blocked during load time, like textual ads.

Second, CleanWeb performance was increased by an order of magnitude, and now it optionally supports using PCRE as regexp matching engine, since QRegExps are quite slow. In fact, separator-based rules are only enabled when PCRE is used.

Here are some numbers for rutracker.org main page and EasyList + RuAdList rules, where cummulative time spent matching all rules for all issued requests is measured:

The numbers are self-explanatory.

Moreover, element hiding performance was also measured on a complex Google+ page:

Here the difference is even more obvious.

LMP

The next (and possibly the biggest) part of this release is LMP, our audio player module (paired with LastFMScrobble module providing Last.FM integration), which has been improved a lot

LMP now features revamped radio support and a new plugin, HotStreams, has been added to provide access to tons of radio streams from radio stations like Digitally Imported, SomaFM or from huge streams directory at dir.xiph.org:

Moreover, LMP now is even more social: paired with LastFMScrobble, it is now able to fetch personalized recommended concerts and festivals. Of course, this is location-aware, so only events near you will be shown. It’s quite easy to add support for other such social events aggregators, if any.

Playlist loading is now asynchronous, so you may add all your collection to the playlist and the rest of LeechCraft will be usable while all your songs are added. To handle such huge playlists a playlist search has been added. Search is quite intellectual and also counts such fields like genre or album date. Also, playlist memory usage has been optimized: all album art pixmaps are scaled down to 48x48 in the playlist.

Regarding collection, LMP now can remove tracks from collection or erase them from disk. It also watches files and directories in collection for changes, and changed items are automatically rescanned in case, for example, tags have been changed.

Transcoding has been improved. More formats are supported now, like AAC or WMA, and user is free to choose the desired bitrate type (constant or variable). Moreover, the list of supported formats is dynamically fetched from FFmpeg at runtime, so only those formats that will actually work are displayed:

And, speaking of transcoding and device synchronization, LMP DumbSync subplugin, which is used to upload music to non-MTP and non-iThing devices, now also supports uploading album art with the music.

Collection statistics dialog is also available:

There are also lots of other fixes and improvements, like improved biography and similar artists templates, with nice effects like background blurring on photo view:

NetStoreManager

Moving on to other plugins, the NetStoreManager module now supports synchronization, watching the file system for changes to automatically upload new or changed files in watched directories. For now the file system watcher is inotify-only, so this won’t work on platforms other than Linux. And, of course, this is quite an experimental feature for now — use at your own risk.

Drag’n’drop support was also enhanced. Now files can be moved between directories using drag’n’drop, for example.

The Yandex.Narod backend module has been removed: NetStoreManager isn’t an “upload-and-forget” kind of thing anymore, and the features of the Yandex.Narod service don’t match NetStoreManager’s aim anymore. Yandex.Narod will be replaced with Yandex.Disk service some time in the future.

Azoth

Azoth’s (our IM client) and Azoth Xoox’s (XMPP implementation) file transfer capabilities were also improved. Azoth now supports sending files both by protocol means and via modules like NetStoreManager, all from a single handy dialog:

That’s yet one more profit from LeechCraft-style modules integration, by the way.

Also, drag’n’drop support for file sending was improved significantly. Azoth Xoox now supports setting a SOCKS5 file transfer proxy, and by default it autodetects the one offered by the Jabber server.

Azoth Autopaste module now supports selecting syntax highlighter and choosing the paste service when pasting:

Azoth Metacontacts module now shows its pseudo account in the roster only if there are metacontacts.

Other plugins

Monocle, our modular document reader, got support for the DjVu format, though quite basic for now, via the Monocle Seen plugin. Seen doesn’t support things like table of contents yet, but this will be implemented in next releases.

Among other significant changes:

Of course, there was a bunch of other improvements, and curious ones can see the corresponding development digests: #30, #31 and #32.

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.