Today is a great day for LeechCraft: version 0.6.0 “Surreal State of Enlightenment” is released!

We won’t list the bugfixes since the 0.5.99 release candidate (well, we will, but in the very end of this article), but rather describe what has been added since previous major release, 0.5.0. And there is really quite a lot of new things to talk about.

The screenshots for this article are taken from the development branch for the upcoming 0.6.60 version, but there isn’t really much difference except for a few new things here or there.

LMP

LMP, the LeechCraft Music Player, is possibly the plugin we invested most time and effort in since Azoth. As you can guess from the name, it is an audio player:

Well, we had a plugin that could play music for quite some time, but it was rather a stub. Now we have a proper collection- and social-oriented player having everything you would expect from an audio player today and that is ready to compete with monsters like Amarok:

It is based on music collections concept:

gets even better if you have a Last.FM account (and LastFMScrobble module):

allowing you to stay on the front edge of the new or hyped music:

as well as to discover what you may also like:

fetches lyrics automatically:

supports transcoding to removable devices (dumb flash-like in 0.6.0, but full MTP support is already implemented in master development branch and will be present in 0.6.60):

can fetch artists discographies (from MusicBrainz via MusicZombie module, for example) and preview them from VKontakte, and allow one to just browse information about artists:

The player integrates with the rest of LeechCraft, so that Azoth can automatically announce what tune you are listening to via XMPP User Tune extension or similar means for other protocols.

It also has some other cool features, like MPRIS on *NIX systems or support for cloud services like MP3Tunes and a general catalogue of Icecast/Shoutcast streams via the HotStreams module.

LMP also has a subplugin, Graffiti, for tag manipulation, CUE files splitting:

LMP Graffiti also supports renaming files according to a mask and fetching tags from MusicBrainz/AcoustID by the means of acoustic fingerprinting:

Support for all the external services is implemented via separate plugins, so integrating with Jamendo, Grooveshark, Google Music or analogs of MusicBrainz is a matter of writing another plugin completely separate from LMP’s code.

In the upcoming 0.6.60 LMP will be based on GStreamer instead of Phonon in 0.6.0, and the transition is already made. The switch allowed us to implement a proper and always-working gapless playback and gives us an opportunity to add support for nice features like ReplayGain or a proper equalizer later.

SB2

We had a sidebar panel in the 0.5.0 release, and this is a complete rewrite of it: meet Sidebar 2.0, or just SB2. The panel on the bottom of all other screenshots in this announce is the SB2, so we won’t provide yet one more screenshot here.

SB2 is written in QML (though with C++ logic backend, of course), thus much more flexible and extensible: a lot of things can be easily achieved which were nearly impossible (if possible at all) with the old widgets/actions-based sidebar, which it replaces.

SB2 operates around the concept of quarks which are similar to KDE Plasma’s plasmoids. A quark is a small more-or-less self-contained visual element placed on SB2 (or a hypothetical similar desktop plugin) which may be written entirely in QML or backed by a full-blown native C++ plugin. There are quite a few quarks already:

The SB2 panel supports the multiwindow support introduced in this release (more on this later), allowing to have different panel orientations, quark lists and individual quark settings for each window.

For now quarks can be placed only on the SB2 panel, but we are thinking of writing another plugin, some kind of a dashboard, serving as a standard desktop screen, where quarks can also be placed. Moreover, the same quark can provide different look and feel in different contexts. For example, a hypothetical weather quark will display just a weather icon and a couple of digits for the temperature on the SB2 panel, turning into a big and fancy widget with a week-long weather forecast on the dashboard.

Unfortunately QML is known to crash on some systems: all such distinctive reports were got were from Ubuntu and openSUSE users. For now we couldn’t find a better workaround than suggesting disabling the plugin if you experience strange random segfaults when interacting with SB2.

Monocle

Another big new plugin is Monocle, the document reader:

Monocle is modular, and different formats are supported by different modules. The following are supported: PDF, FB2, DjVu and PostScript (0.6.60 also will add support for MOBI).

It’s quite feature-rich and surely can compete with Okular and the likes. It supports tables of contents, forms (in PDF), thumbnails, bookmarks, one- or two-pages layouts, fullscreen mode, links and some other features:

Monocle integrates with the rest of LeechCraft, so, for example, a just downloaded document will automatically be opened in Monocle.

Blogique

One more new thing in this release is Blogique, the blogging platform client plugin:

For now only local blog and Livejournal.com is supported, though support for more platforms is planned. Like Azoth and Monocle, Blogique is modular, and adding a new platform is a matter of writing another plugin.

Blogique is primarily aimed at creating (with a WYSIWYG editor), updating and keeping blog entries on remote blog platforms (via Metida plugin for Livejournal) or locally (through Hestia plugin). Blogique supports drafts, autosaves and allows viewing last comments in blogs. There is also a calendar to ease navigating through the blog.

Hestia subplugin for local blogging supports sending its posts into any other accounts of any other blogging system. We plan on adding this crossposting feature to other platform plugins in next releases.

Metida subplugin for Livejournal has quite some features to offer. It supports all of LJ’s post parameters, from access rights to mood, geolocation and current music (with autofetching from MPRIS or LMP plugin). It can also add Like and Repost buttons, create polls and put parts of the post into cut. By the way as far as we know, it’s the only blog client (on Linux, at least) supporting LJ-specific tags.

We think of implementing blog backup/exporting, viewing friends’ posts and commenting through the client without browser use. Tell us what you think about this!

NetStoreManager

Most changes in NetStoreManager correspond to its appearance and usability.

Most LeechCraft users are accustomed two-panel file managers like Krusader, Midnight Commander or Total Commander, so we decided to change NSM’s UI from a tree view to something similar to these file managers (one panel for now, though):

There are some new features. More files and directories actions are supported, like copying, moving, erasing and moving to trash. There is also a “silent mode” for previewing files: a file is automatically downloaded to a temporary directory and opened after it finishes.

Google Drive plugin now supports exporting some file types supported by Google Docs, to various formats that differ from the original format of the file.

There are also usability improvements, for example, accessing trash is now easier via a special toolbar button, and each file has an icon according to its MIME type.

Other new plugins

We have a bunch of new smaller plugins as well.

Liznoo

A power manager, using UPower on Linux, native ioctls on FreeBSD and native APIs on Mac OS X. It supports reporting battery level, status and statistics, notifying other plugins about suspend/hibernate events (so that Azoth can gracefully disconnect from the servers, for example) and drawing nice power consumption graphs:


Launchy

Third-party application launcher based on FreeDesktop.Org specifications. It provides a quark for SB2 and a full-screen launch panel:

In master branch it also fully supports keyboard navigation and launching arbitrary applications (not only those providing a .desktop file).

Vrooby

Removable storage devices manager, currently available only for Linux and using the UDisks daemon. It also provides data about removable storages to other plugins, so that LMP, for example, can know about such devices and sync with them.

Dolozhee

Issue reporting tool, allows one to submit bug reports and feature requests easily even without being registered on LeechCraft issue tracker.

Other improvements

Multiple windows

We got complaints about LeechCraft being single-windows almost from the inception of the project, and people generally refused to try it out because they didn’t like the idea of everything being in a single window. Well, this reason is not valid anymore: LeechCraft finally supports multiple windows. The support is quite experimental for now, bugs and crashes are possible, but seems like it’s already quite stable for general usage scenarios.

For now there are two modes of multiwindowing: either manual, where new windows are created upon user’s explicit request (like pressing a New window button) and new tabs appear in the currently active window, or semiautomatic, where tabs of different kinds appear in different windows and new windows are created automatically if needed. The later mode somewhat mimicks traditional multiapplication approach, where browser tabs are in one window, private chats are in another, conferences and channels in the third and all opened documents in the fourth. Both modes support moving tabs between windows as user wishes.

New IM protocols

Azoth, our IM client, now also supports MRIM and Windows Messenger protocol (though seems like the latter protocol is already deprecated itself by the time of the release). The support is quite basic: for example, multiuser chatrooms aren’t supported for the MRIM protocol yet, but it is already quite usable for day-to-day usage.

And, moreover, support for the native VKontakte API is already implemented in the master branch and will be available in the soon-to-be-released 0.6.60 version. This is quite important since VKontakte has already shut down its XMPP servers. Moreover, this native API plugin already supports more than VKontakte provides through the older XMPP API.

Mac OS X support

Yes, LeechCraft is now available for Mac OS X 10.7 (and upper), thanks to the awesome clang compiler and the UNIX environment. In fact, you can see it on the Liznoo screenshot.

Several platform-specific things are also supported, ranging from the maximization icon in the upper right corner of LeechCraft windows to proper support for its power management APIs in the Liznoo module, for example.

Bugs fixed since 0.5.99

Time for the list of issues fixed in this release compared to the 0.5.99 beta, as promised in the beginning of this post:

Towards DE

Yes, jokes aside, we actually think of turning LeechCraft into a desktop environment. Of course, according to LeechCraft spirit it is purely optional and implemented via different plugins, but some required changes are already implemented, like the multiwindows support, power manager or app launcher.

The upcoming 0.6.60 version will have a special desktop mode, where LeechCraft window automatically becomes desktop window, and SB2 widget is created as a top-level panel, visible even when other apps are active:

0.6.60 will also feature some new related plugins, like Fenet for controlling window and compositing managers:

KBSwitch for configuring keyboard layouts:

as well as Krigstask (the taskbar and pager), Mellonetray (well, the tray) and Laughty, the libnotify notification server.