jeudi, mars 25 2010
Par Guillaume Desmottes le jeudi, mars 25 2010, 14:57 - Nerdzage
One of our goal for Empathy 2.31 is to use standard status icons rather than empathy specific ones. That means Empathy will respect the XDG Icon Naming spec so icon themes will be able to easily define their own icons.
Currently some themes, such as Ubuntu's humanity icon theme, already define their own status icons by implementing empathy-* icons. If you are a theme author be aware that this won't work with Empathy 2.31.x so you'd probably want to implement the official icons as well to ensure that your theme will continue to work properly with future releases of Empathy. That's what the humanity theme has done for example.
Note that the user-invisible icon isn't officially part of the spec but Empathy will make use of it. I requested to add it so it should hopefully be integrated at some point.
I also sent an email requesting to rename user-idle to user-extended-away as the current naming is pretty poor but until it's accepted you should continue to use the current name.
Empathy using Ubuntu Lucid's icon theme
jeudi, février 11 2010
Par Guillaume Desmottes le jeudi, février 11 2010, 19:30 - Nerdzage
As you probably know, Facebook now allows you to connect to Facebook chat using any XMPP client. This is a great news as it allows Facebook users to chat using Free Software and can potentially bring millions of new people to XMPP, our favorite IM protocol.
As a XMPP client, you can already use Empathy to connect to Facebook. Alan wrote a nice post explaining how to configure Empathy to do so.
One of our main goals with Empathy is to make the application really easy to use for all kinds of users. So, today I added a new widget to configure Facebook accounts. Facebook now appears as a separate protocol[1] and the widget provides information to the user about how to configure it properly.
The release team folks have been kind enough to allow merging the branch despite the UI freeze so this new widget will be available in Empathy 2.29.91 (which will be released the 22th of Feb) and of course 2.30!
jeudi, février 4 2010
Par Guillaume Desmottes le jeudi, février 4 2010, 13:28 - 3615 My Life
This year again I'll be at FOSDEM this week-end[1].
I should be around the GNOME stand/devroom and will, of course, attend the beer event on Saturday night.
Don't hesitate to come and say hi if you want to discuss about Telepathy, Empathy, Moovida or about your favorite Belgian beer.
For those who are lucky enough to own a N900 don't forget to download the FOSDEM 2010 Maemo application. The UI is pretty shit but the features are quite nice and it allows you to easily build your schedule for the week-end. If you are more an Android, iPhone or Palm person the app is also available for those plateforms.
See you there!
mercredi, décembre 23 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le mercredi, décembre 23 2009, 23:00 - Nerdzage
Few weeks ago I released a new plugin for Moovida. This little brother of my RTBF plugin brings content from the ARTE+7 website to Moovida.
ARTE is a cultural Franco-German public TV network providing lot of very interesting documentaries. Unfortunately, because of legal reasons, most of the documentaries are only available from Germany, France and Belgium. That's a shame because the content is generally pretty good.
So if you are lucky enough to live in one of those countries you should really install Moovida and give the plugin a try (it should be installed by default now).
Three weeks ago Fluendo and Mandriva organized a plugin developement contest. The contest ended last week and I won! To celebrate that I wrote a small text introducing myself and my FOSS contributions on the Moovida blog.
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lundi, décembre 21 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le lundi, décembre 21 2009, 21:57 - 3615 My Life
I finally got a new server and moved my blog to it. So hopefully all my hosting problems should be fixed now. :)
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mercredi, octobre 21 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le mercredi, octobre 21 2009, 20:49 - Nerdzage
More and more distributions are now planning to ship Empathy as their default chat client: Fedora, Mandriva, Moblin, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, and so on.
As a result of this, and because we want to offer the best
experience to our users, we at Collabora decided to put more resources
on the Empathy project. That's why, as of this Monday, I'm now working
full-time on Empathy, and have become co-maintainer with Xavier.
One of my first tasks has been to write a roadmap for Empathy 2.30. As I said on the wiki page, these are really just guidelines detailing the general direction we want to give to the
project. We'll, of course, continue to review patches[1] from contributors and to fix nasty issues such as regressions and crashers reported by users.
So don't hesitate to report any issue you could have experienced with Empathy and join the Empathy/Telepathy community to help us to make 2.30 rock!
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mardi, septembre 22 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le mardi, septembre 22 2009, 22:12 - Nerdzage
One of my favorite new feature in Empathy 2.28 is definitely the Vino and Vinagre integration. Users can now easily share their desktop with their contacts by a simple click in Empathy. The contact then receives an invitation which will automatically launch Vinagre and connect it to the Vino server of the sharer. No need to worry about sending your internet IP or open and forward a port in your firewall; all the technical details are hidden to offer the easiest user experience as possible.
This integration between IM and application is done by using Telepathy tubes in Vino and Vinagre.
Kudos to Arnaud Maillet who worked on this as his internship project at Collabora and to the Vino/Vinagre developpers who welcomed our work with lot of enthusiasm.
With the switch to Mission Control 5, I hope to see more and more projects starting to use Telepathy in order to increase the collaborative user experience in the GNOME desktop.
What next?
Better integration
Mission Control 5 and the new ContactCapabilities interface will allow us to improve the integration during the 2.30 cycle. We'll be able to hide the 'Share my desktop' button if Vino hasn't been built with Telepathy support and to unsensitive it if the contact doesn't have a tube enabled Vinagre installed.
Better performance
Currently telepathy-gabble tries to connect the tube to the peer using the following algorithm:
- If available connect to peer's IPv6 address
- Try to connect to peer's IPv4 address
- Try to use a SOCKS5 proxy
- Fallback to IBB
That means that if your are on a different LAN than your contact, without IPv6, and that your Jabber doesn't provide a fast SOCKS5 proxy, the connection will be pretty slow.
We hope to solve this at some point by implementing stream tube Jingle NAT penetration in telepathy-gabble. Thanks to the Telepathy abstraction, Vino and Vinagre won't have to change a single line of code to benefit from this improvement; they'll magically start to use it as soon as Gabble gains this feature!
KDE interoperability
George is also working on implementing similar feature in KDE using Kopete, krdb and krdc. Easy cross desktop sharing is coming!
Screenshots
Share your desktop in one click
lundi, septembre 21 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le lundi, septembre 21 2009, 21:00 - Nerdzage
Empathy 2.28
Xavier recently released Empathy 2.28 which is a really important milestone for us. Lot of people have been involved in this new version which contains lot of changes and cool new features.
I will try to present some of them in a few blog posts.
Adium themes
We merged an one year old branch implementing Adium chat themes support using Webkit. Old GTK+ themes are still present as well.
Adium themes can be selected using Empathy's preferences dialog; they just have to be installed in ~/.local/share/adium/message-styles/ or /usr/local/share/adium/message-styles/ so distributions can easily package themes.
Adium themes support is currently optional; be sure to build Empathy with Webkit >= 1.1.7 to enable them. The Empathy package shipped in Debian and Ubuntu Karmic already have this feature.
What next?
Our wiki has a page listing tested themes. Feel free to try some, update the wiki and report bugs if you experience issues.
The theme selector could also be improved to display a preview or support CSS variants.
It would be also rocking cool to have adiumxtra:// links properly managed so users would be able to easily install themes from the Adium website.
If you are interested in implementing one of these features, your contribution will be really appreciated. :)
The Renkoo theme in Empathy
lundi, septembre 14 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le lundi, septembre 14 2009, 22:34 - Nerdzage
Lots of you were waiting for it, it's finally there: you can now make MSN compatible audio/video calls using Empathy!
Louis-Francis released telepathy-butterfly 0.5.1 today, bringing this long awaited feature to our users.
In order to use it you'll need:
Packages should reach Debian and our Ubuntu Telepathy PPA pretty soon.
Lot of people deserve credits for this big achievement which involve a lot of work in different Collabora projects:
- Philippe Kalaf, Olivier Crête, Youness Alaoui and Richard Spiers for the Farsight 2 plugins.
- Youness, Ole Andre and Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne for the reverse engineering of the MSN protocols and its implementation in Papyon.
- Youness (him again!) for the NAT traversal code in libnice.
- Louis-Francis and Jonny Lamb for the Telepathy layer in Butterfly.
- The Empathy team and especially Jonathan Tellier who polished the audio/video GUI
Let's not forget the amsn project which was used as a base of the protocol work.
Bigon and me testing Empathy interop with the official MSN client.
So what next? As audio/video video wasn't enough to keep Louis-Francis busy during his summer internship at Collabora, he also implemented file transfer support in Butterfly! His branch should hopefully be merged soon and so Empathy will gain MSN FT support!
Olivier Le Thanh Duong on his side just finished implementing offline messages support.
As you can see Butterfly development is more active than ever!
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mardi, juillet 7 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le mardi, juillet 7 2009, 20:23 - Nerdzage
This morning, as planned, I gave my talk: "Let's make GNOME a collaborative desktop". I think it did pretty well. The audience (I'd say around 50 people) seems really interested and excited about the new features I presented. I uploaded the slides and added them to the list of Telepathy related talks.
I suggest you to take a look at them if you are interested about Telepathy/Collaboration integration in the GNOME desktop and/or are working on one of the following project: Epiphany, Tomboy/Gnote, Evince, Abiword, the clock applet... I suggested (with mockups!) some ideas about how Telepathy could bring some cool new features to your app.
If you are interested in implementing one of these days ideas, we'll be happy to help you on our IRC channel or mailing list.
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lundi, juillet 6 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le lundi, juillet 6 2009, 12:30 - Nerdzage
Since Saturday, I'm in Grand Canaria attending the Desktop Summit with almost all the Collabora Gang.
I'll give a talk tomorrow (Tuesday 7th) at 11:00: "Let's make GNOME a collaborative desktop". I'll talk about Telepathy and how it could be used in GNOME to bring new cool features to our users.
I'll try to focus as much as possible on concrete use cases and be less technical as possible. So don't hesitate to come if you are interested about improving GNOME's user experience, collaboration or just want to see crappy mockups[1]. :-)
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dimanche, juin 7 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le dimanche, juin 7 2009, 14:03 - Nerdzage
I just released the 0.6 version of my Elisa/Moovida RTBF plugin.
The goal of this release is to integrate better with Moovida's user interface.
- Fix "Use this plugin" hook with Moovida.
- Use new, Moovida style, square icon.
- Move radios menu to "Internet -> Radio"
It should hopefully be available through Moovida's plugin section next week.
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mardi, avril 14 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le mardi, avril 14 2009, 21:27 - Nerdzage
As Jaunty is now almost released, I synced the Jaunty Telepahy PPA with Debian packages. Main user visible changes include:
- File transfer support in Gabble
- Better Theora support in video calls
- Support of Google relays improving connectivity when trying to establish audio/video calls using a gtalk account.
As usual, we'll try to keep the PPA as sync as possible with latest released versions. So if you are interested in bleeding edge Telepathy components just add this repo:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
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vendredi, avril 3 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le vendredi, avril 3 2009, 16:55 - Nerdzage
As promised, telepathy-gabble[1] finally supports file transfer!
I just released telepathy-gabble 0.7.25 implementing this long awaited feature.
This is a very important step as you can now send and receive files over Internet using Telepathy (the telepathy-salut implementation being limited to inter-LAN file transfers). This is also probably the last big feature that Empathy was missing compared to its ancestor Gossip. By the way, be sure to upgrade to Empathy 2.26.0.1 before starting to send files using Gabble (see this bug if you are interested in the technical details).
File transfer is implemented using XEP-0096: SI File Transfer, XEP-0065: SOCKS5 Bytestreams and XEP-0047: In-Band Bytestreams. Most of the XMPP clients implement those XEP's so interoperability should work just fine; with the notable exception of the GTalk desktop client.
We also use our simple SI extension to fallback to IBB if the SOCKS5 negotiation fails. That means that file transfer between 2 Gabble should always work! In the worst case the transfer will be really slow but at least working.
Our SOCKS5 implementation has been seriously improved too. It now supports IPv6 so p2p connections will be used if both peers are on an IPv6 network. We also implemented SOCKS5 relay, so if peers can't be connected directly (typically because they are behind a NAT), they'll try to use a proxy to relay their data. As lot of XMPP servers don't provide proxy at the moment, we hardcoded a bunch of public ones which will be used as fallback. These SOCKS5 improvements will not be used only for file transfers but also for tubes! The only exception is the relay support which has been disabled in muc stream tubes because the SOCKS5 XEP doesn't properly support muc contacts.
So, what about the futur? Jingle File Transfer is the next big beast. It will enable interoperability with the GTalk desktop client and will allow us to do crazy ICE thinsg for real NAT penetration.
But for now I'm going enjoy a nice week of holidays in the moutain so if you experience any trouble please file bugs as I won't be on IRC before next week. :)
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samedi, mars 21 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le samedi, mars 21 2009, 12:29 - Nerdzage
Lot of great GNOME related news this week!
Release of GNOME 2.26
As planned, GNOME 2.26 has been released Wednesday. By running Jaunty I'm already using it and didn't find anything awful to complain about for now.
On the Empathy front, I think we did a pretty good job with this release which should bring some nice new features to users:
- As already announced the Audio/Video support received a lot of love. Theora should hopefully increase the support "out of the box" on most distros. Be sure to have at least telepathy-gabble 0.7.22 installed if you want to use audio/video in Jabber.
- Empathy is now able to send and receives files. The only released connection manager implementing it at the moment is Salut 0.3.8 (XMPP link-local) but don't worry, Jabber support is coming! My implementation in Gabble is basically ready and my branches are waiting for review so it should be released pretty soon.
- Empathy's dispatcher has been completely rewritten. That should improve reliabilty and allowed us to improve the logger to ensure to log messages as soon as possible (and so avoid to lose it if something goes wrong).
- This new dispatcher can now dipatch new style tubes. The API is still a draft but I hope we'll undraft it in the next weeks.
- Chat rooms invitiations are now supported. You can easily invite contacts to join a room and receive a nice notification when you are invited to join one.
- The accounts dialog now have an "Import accounts" button you can use to import your existing accounts from Pidgin. Thanks to its modular design more applications should be supported in futur versions. A Gajim backend should be merged soon.
- We also implemented sound notifications using libcanberra. Be sure to have a sound theme installed if you want to use them.
- Libnotify is also supported now so you can receive a nice notification bubble when you receive a new message, an incoming call, etc.
- Few months ago Matthew did a very complete usability study of Empathy's UI. We continued to fix the problems he raised and polish our user interface in general. I hope he'll be able to update his review at some point to give us more feedback on the latest versions.
- Thanks to the great work of Milo Casagrande the user documentation received a lot of love.
- And of course lot of various bugs has been fixed.
Empathy 2.26.0 (and the needed pieces of the Telepathy stack) is already available in Ubuntu Jaunty. If you are still using Intrepid, you can use the Telepathy PPA to get backported packages from Jaunty (but could have some problems with audio/video due to older GStreamer versions).
The 2.26.0 package should reach Debian Sid soonish as well.
As usual, if you experience problem, don't be shine and increase a bit more our bug counts :)
Git migration
The Git migration has finally be announced! Almost all the Empathy developement is already done through Git so that's obvioulsy a great news for us. I think that's also the right decision as that's the tool used by most the developers and external components of the GNOME stack (GStreamer, Telepathy, PulseAudio, Avahi, Cairo...).
Thanks to the release and Git migration teams for managing that.
GNOME Summer of Code
This year again, GNOME has been accepted as an organization for the Google's Summer of Code and students have already started to think about nice ideas of project. Feel free to contact us by mail or IRC (#telepathy@FreeNode) if you are interested to work on Telepathy and/or its integration in the GNOME desktop.
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samedi, mars 14 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le samedi, mars 14 2009, 17:27 - Nerdzage
Last week I released the 0.5 version of my Elisa RTBF plugin.
As you can see from the release notes, this version adds two new features: the addition of all the Webradios and the support of the new video streaming system.
The latter is definitely the most interesting feature. The RTBF recently released their new video streaming flash interface. It's now possible to watch a lot of different shows (and not only the news as before) and the video quality was really improved. After some reverse engineering (thanks Wireshark!), I discovered that the flash client was communicating with the server using a simple AMF protocol. At this point it was really easy to query the server from my plugin using the great PyAMF library.
This means that this new version of the plugin is able to access to the same content that the official flash client!
If you don't have Elisa installed and want to see the plugin in action, David uploaded a nice Youtube video.
Elisa updated his plugins repo so you should now be able to install this version directly from Elisa's plugins UI. Upgrade should also be done automatically if you have installed an older version of the plugin previously.
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samedi, janvier 24 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le samedi, janvier 24 2009, 19:36 - Nerdzage
As announced by Rob, I recently started to hack an Abicollab backend using Telepathy tubes. It's based on the existing Write backend to ensure interoperability with Sugar.
See this screencast where an Abiword document is shared to participants who are using Abiword and Write.
My code is quiet rude and still need a lot of cleaning and polishing but that's a big first step. Hopefully, the futur improvements in Telepathy and Abicollab would make possible a rocking desktop integration of the collaboration features in the near futur!
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mercredi, janvier 21 2009
Par Guillaume Desmottes le mercredi, janvier 21 2009, 21:25 - Divers
Collabora is proud to present our new mascot: the coding ninja!
Mug, stickers and stress ball
The new very classy Collabora T-Shirt
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lundi, décembre 22 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le lundi, décembre 22 2008, 18:37 - Nerdzage
Dear lazy web,
Do you have any idea how to use the awesome refdbg with GLib 2.18? I use to rebuild my libglib2.0-0 package with
--enable-debug=yes --disable-visibility
and it worked fine, but since I switched to Ubuntu Intrepid (and so GLib 2.18) I have this error when trying to use it:
(process:6902): RefDbg-CRITICAL **: LD_PRELOAD function override not working. Need to build glib with --disable-visibility? (See README), aborting..
Thanks!
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dimanche, décembre 21 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le dimanche, décembre 21 2008, 18:29 - Nerdzage
I just made the first public announce of my Elisa RTBF plugin so now is probably a good time to blog about it.
Dear Elisa friends,
I'm happy to announce the first release of the RTBF plugin marked as
stable. That means you can easily install it from Elisa's plugins list.
RTBF or Radio télévision belge de la communauté française is the
national broadcasting organisation of the government of the
French-speaking southern part of Belgium.
This plugin adds support for easy access to RTBF's radio streams and TV
news.
This is the perfect plugin if
- You are Belgian and want to easily watch the news and listen radio.
- You'd like to improve your French by listening cool music (Pure FM is
quite nice).
- You want to make fun of your Belgian friends by laughing of our
incapability to have a gouvernement.
- You are an Elisa plugin freak and want to install every possible
plugin. :)
Source code, egg file and bug reports are available on launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/elisa-plugin-rtbf
Elisa developers are doing a great job in creating a rocking open media center and opening it to external contributions. The last days have seen the arrival of new cool plugins and more should follow soon. Elisa is progressing really fast (there is a new release every Monday) so I strongly suggest you to try a recent version. And if you have a nice idea of plugin, don't hesitate to write it; plugin's design is not hard and the Elisa team is very nice and helpful.
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