Today we are proud to announce the release of LeechCraft 0.6.65 “Facepalm Mute”!

Some new tasty features and plugins were introduced in this release, and lot of things were changed under the hood, as well as lots of small behavioral issues were fixed or improved in many different plugins. So, let’s get straight to all the new tasty things!

New plugins

Five new plugins have been added in this release.

Aggregator WebAccess

This module has seen its inception quite long ago, but only now it became somewhat ready. WebAccess provides a basic web interface for the Aggregator feed reader, so one can read news articles from a mobile device or another machine:

The module is still extremely experimental, but it is already used by some in some scenarios.

CertMgr

CertMgr is the new SSL manager. It supports both managing the SSL exceptions (like accepted or rejected SSL errors), as well as disabling system-wide SSL certificates and loading custom ones:

CPU Load

CPU load monitoring quark that shows current IO/nice/user/system load in the sidebar and displays a tooltip with the load graphs for each core on hover:

It only supports Linux and Mac OS X systems for now.

Ooronee

A small quark for handling images and text dropped onto it via plugins supporting the data filters concept.

Rosenthal

The spell check core has been moved from Azoth Rosenthal to a first-level plugin, losing the Azoth prefix on the way. Now it can be used by any plugin wishing to check spelling, and it also supports multiple dictionaries now.

LMP

Most significant change in this release of the LMP audio player is the support for ReplayGain. Now LMP understands the ReplayGain metadata in audio files and adjusts the volume accordingly. Of course, album mode is supported.

We are aware that ReplayGain information is very rarely met in nature, so another ReplayGain-related feature is automatic analysis and RG metadata calculation for audio files in your collection. The calculated metadata is stored in local collection, leaving your files intact, so you can safely continue seeding them in a bittorrent client, for example. One more reason to use collection in LMP, and one more reason to use LMP — as far as we know, almost no other audio players support this.

LMP’s internals were upgraded in this release to support various audio filters, so get ready for various equalizers, visual effects and so on in next release!

Also, LMP now works properly on Mac OS X, and the Mac package now contains all required gstreamer plugins, so one can play FLAC or MP3 files or listen to internet radio on Macs now as well. Moreover, proper support for files watching was added: it was impossible to add a directory containing more than 256 files to collection before that. Now the watching backend explicitly uses FSEvents on Mac, supporting unlimited number of files in collection.

The Graffiti submodule for audio tags manipulation now supports canceling directory iteration and has got a few fixes regarding CUE support. We plan to move to shntool in next releases though.

Among other improvements and fixed issues:

Azoth

Azoth, the IM client, is probably the most widely-used module and most mature one, but it still gets tons of new features and improvements. For example, Azoth now supports server history (for the protocols that support this concept). So, if you had a conversation on another device or client you still can access it from Azoth and view the messages stored on server. Only XMPP and VKontakte protocols support this feature for now, and XEP-0313 is chosen for XMPP instead of older but way more clumsy XEP-0136. XEP-0313 requires support both from client and server, and as far as we know only Prosody supports it.

The Xoox submodule implementing the XMPP protocol gained support for Message Carbons. That is, a resource may now optionally get all messages from all other resources, including the sent ones. This helps maintaining the conversation flow across different devices somewhat similarly to Skype. Message Carbons are forcefully disabled for some types of messages, though, for example for OTR messages. Of course, this is strictly optional and, moreover, opt-in feature.

A few other smaller fixes and improvements are available in the Xoox module:

VKontakte support (by the Murm module) has been improved as well. Besides supporting server history, Azoth Murm now can rename multiuser chats and invite contacts to multiuser chats. A few issues have been fixed as well, like sending messages containing the < symbol or crashes on some slow connections.

Azoth now also supports sending images via the image data filter plugins, like Imgaste or Blasq. In this case an image is uploaded to an imagebin or a cloud image hosting service respectively, and a link to it is sent to the chat.

Just as with LMP, quite a few improvements were done and issues have been fixed as well:

Monocle

Monocle, the document reader, now supports annotated documents. For now annotations are only supported for PDF documents, and only basic textual annotations are recognized. They are displayed both inline in the document and in a special side panel:

Creating annotations is not supported yet.

By the way, you can help by sending us a few documents containing graphical or sound annotations. You can attach them to a bug report or a mail to the mailing list.

PDF backend now also supports threaded rendering if built with Poppler 0.24.0 is newer. Threaded rendering allows both seamless scrolling without freezing the UI and scrolling process as well as uniform CPU cores utilization if multiple pages are shown at once.

LHTR

The LHTR visual hypertext editor component used primarily by the Blogique module now gained support for the image sources plugins (that Blasq also became in this release), so that images can be inserted easily. First we select the service we want to insert images from:

Then we select the images we want to add (of course, multiple selection is supported):

Then we choose image parameters, like the size of the previews, the alt text for each image, the alignment and so on:

And finally:

Also, the HTML editor now supports syntax highlighting.

Other plugins

Other fixes

Among significant ones:

Other than that, a lot of smaller issues and rare crashes were fixed in this release.

Also, some Mac OS X-specific issues were fixed. Besides what’s been mentioned for LMP:

Source package is already available, so is Mac OS X package. Packages for other supported OS and distros will be available a bit later.