Today LeechCraft 0.6.70 “Severance” is released!

Three months and almost two thousands of commits have passed since the previous release, and we are proud to announce some new plugins and quite a few improvements, optimizations and fixes!

Two thousands of commits brought a lot of new features and changes, so this announce covers them from a bird’s eye. Please refer to the changelog if you wish more detailed list of changes.

LMP

Let’s start with the LMP audio player.

First, it’s worth noting the newly added support for creating AdvancedNotifications rules directly from the playlist:

Choosing the menu item automatically opens AdvancedNotifications settings tab with all fields filled according to the track selected, so all that’s left is to configure the notification methods:

The tracks with the associated rules are marked by a flag colored according to the rule color (that can be set in the Advanced Notifications settings), filled if the rule is enabled and hollow if it is disabled. It is also possible to directly open the rules configuration from the track menu:

That’s what we call “modules integration”!

Effects

LMP also got support for various filters and effects in the 0.6.65 version, and, as promised, some new effects were added in this release, like FrAdj,a 10-band equalizer effect with presets:

Perhaps the most interesting effect is HttStream — streaming module, allowing one to stream music playing in LMP to other devices via HTTP. It is possible to add many copies of this filter, listening on different interfaces/ports and encoding the stream at different bitrates. This way music can be streamed with maximum quality on a local area network, and two instances, with high-quality and medium-quality encoding, can be exposed to the Internet, for example.

We think of adding a web interface and an RPC API to LMP in nearest releases, which, combined with HttStream, can turn LMP into a small media server.

BrainSlugz

Another new LMP subplugin added in this release is BrainSlugz, checking the local user’s discography for new missed releases:


BrainSlugz uses other first-level plugins like MusicZombie (for MusicBrainz) to query the discographies, thus other information sources can easily be added by merely writing a new module without changing BrainSlugz.

NetStoreManager

NetStoreManager, our cloud storage manager plugin, has got a submodule for Dropbox support, supporting everything it should support: file uploads, downloads, file listings and so on. Dropbox guys haven’t issued a fully working key yet, though.

Also, NetStoreManager now supports parallel mass downloading all selected files from the GUI.

Eleeminator

Quite a long-awaited plugin, Eleeminator brings a terminal emulator to LeechCraft:

It supports everything one would expect from a terminal emulator: multiple tabs, configurable color schemes, clipboard, links detection and opening. It integrates well with Advanced Notifications, allowing creation of the notification rules for bells in terminals.

Eleeminator also keeps track of the programs running in each terminal tab, updating the title accordingly. It also shows a warning if one tries to close a tab with something running in either background or foreground:

Eleeminator is based on the QTermWidget library, and some code has been contributed back to that project.

Poshuku

Poshuku is our web browser module, and it has got support for quite a few new plugins and features in this release.

DC/AC

A simple but useful module, DC/AC provides a color invertor working on any site without any custom CSS:

It also supports a thresholded mode, when colors are inverted only when the web page in question is brighter that some given threshold.

SpeedDial

Another long-awaited plugin which, as the name goes, adds Speed Dial functionality to the Poshuku browser:

SpeedDial supports automatic mode as well as a static list of pages. In the former case two lists are shown: one for most frequently visited pages and another one for most frequently visited hosts. This way if you visit, say, different Slashdot pages quite often from your RSS feed reader, each page would have quite low visits frequency and rating, but Slashdot would still show up in the list.

QRd

Allows one to generate a QR code representing the current page. This can be quite handy to send the URL of a page to a smartphone or a tablet.

Poshuku itself

The core of the Poshuku module has got an SSL badge notifying about the security of the current connection, whether the connection is fully secure, or some elements were loaded via unencrypted connection, or there were some SSL errors. Teh corresponding dialog allows viewing the certificates chain:

and the list of elements loaded via insecure connection:

AdvancedNotifications Dolle

The OS X-specific notifications module has been refactored out of the Pierre plugin into the Dolle submodule. It now supports showing differently colored badges for different events in the OS X dock, so counters for, say, chat rooms and private messages are shown separately now. Combined with the support for colors in the Advanced Notifications rules added in this release, this can be used to easily distinguish between different event types:

Azoth

Azoth, the IM client, has been migrated to QtMultimediaKit for the Jingle support. QtMultimediaKit from the QtMobility package provides more solid, stable and glitchless experience than plain QtMultimedia in Qt 4, so the Jingle support can now be considered somewhat completed.

A new module has been added, Azoth MuCommands, providing support for various IRC-like commands, like /whois, /ping, /last and so on. This way, mouseless Azoth became much more feasible and usable. The page dedicated to this plugin contains an up-to-date list of the commands.

File transfer notifications have been improved. They now contain buttons for quickly opening the file just transferred, and a persistent notification has also been added, so that a finished file transfer can be seen even if the original notification has been missed.

The tooltips for the entries in the contact list are now generated lazily on hover, saving around 100 KiB of memory per contact. The tooltips themselves have also become a little bit more neat, showing the client and status icons, as well as the contact’s time (if available):

The OTR support module now supports question-based and shared secred authentication:

as well as managing fingerprints:

and accounts keys:

The ChatHistory module has got a new improved search box, along with the forward and case-insensitive search (the latter is available only if SQLite is built with ICU):

Monocle

Monocle now supports redirection backend plugins that merely convert a document from one format to another one, probably supported by another Monocle plugin.

Annotations’ contents can now be copied to clipboard, and the actions shortcuts are now configurable.

The Postrus PostScript support module has been rewritten to just call a converter from .ps to .pdf, as previously calling Ghostscript from the same process Poppler resides in led to nasty crashes.

Otlozhu

Otlozhu, our todo manager, now supports hierarchical tasks:

It has also got a lot of smaller improvements, mostly in GUI. The calendar pane is now resizable, for example, and the comment editing dialog now supports multiline comments.

Other

Optimizations:

Among the fixes for the nastiest crashes and bugs:

The source archive is already available, so is OS X bundle. Packages for other OSes are coming soon.

By the way, this is the first release available in the FreeBSD ports collection. To install, just issue portmaster x11/leechcraft or make -C x11/leechcraft install clean. Whole LeechCraft is represented as a single port file for now, please let us know if this seems inconvenient to you!

Anyway, we will continue to work on FreeBSD support in modules like Liznoo and Vrooby, as well as provide seamless experience for Linux systems without systemd.