Le Weblog à Cassidy

One of my favourite feature of my N900 is the ability to very easily call a contact using my SIP account. Calling phone numbers in Empathy through SIP is possible since a while using the New Call dialog but you have to enter the number manually which can be annoying. Thanks to Folks's evolution-data-server backend, GNOME 3.2 will allow you to very easily call contacts from your address book!

First step is to mark a SIP account as being able to call phone numbers. We added an option for that in the accounts dialog.

Then if an IM contact is linked to an Evolution one having at least a phone field, you can call him from the contact list! Soon you should be able to call IM contacts publishing their phone numbers in their personal personal info as well.

You can also call any contact using gnome-contact directly; just click on the phone icon next to the phone number.

This is pretty cool because thanks to gnome-shell's contact integration it's now easier than ever to call a contact. Just search for him in the Shell overview and then start the call from gnome-contacts. That's the kind of integration we were aiming for when we started the Telepathy and Folks projects and it's great to see that we are finally getting there!

One of our main goals during this developement cycle was to continue improving Empathy's user experience by re-designing different parts of the UI. To do so our Empathy team at Collabora worked closely with designers from the awesome GNOME Design Team.

The log viewer has been completely re-written based on an original design from Matthew Paul Thomas (Canonical). As you can see, this new log viewer now displays calls and offers different options to easily search through the mass of logs.

Empathy 3.2 will also introduce a whole new experimental user interface for audio and video calls designed by Nick Richards (Intel). The new UI is based on Clutter and allows users to select the webcam and microphone used during the call, move the video preview around, etc. It should also gain support for video effects once Raluca finishes integrating her work with Nick's design. This new UI will be optional in 3.2 as it relies on new Telepathy API but will definitely become the default as soon as those API are stabilised.

Not actually me

I have to say that working closely with designers is a really enjoyable experience. It's good to have people to ask to when we are unsure about the best way to present a feature or an option to users. I'm really looking forward to continuing to improve Empathy with them.

Like 36 other Collaborans, I'm going to attend to the Desktop Summit in Berlin.

I'll lead the GNOME IM integration BoF session on Thursday. It will basically be a follow up of our Hackfest in June so if you are interested into instant messaging integration in GNOME feel free to join us.

The GNOME 3.0 Brussels Launch Party will be this Wednesday at Chaff (the same place where we did our first GNOME beer event) from 6:30 pm.

We'll order food around 8 and we'll have a bunch of GNOME 3 goodies to give away.

I know it's pretty short notice, sorry for that, but we had some troubles to find a place. We were initially looking for a place that would have allowed us to do some presentations but didn't find any. Anyway, we'll have beers which is certainly the most important thing. :)

See you there!

We have a ressonably good Belgian GNOME community (for such a small country) but even so we only see each other once or twice per year. In order to try to improve that I'm happy to announce the first GNOME Brussels Beer event which will take place the 15th December^[1].

The idea is pretty similar to the London Beer events: meet at some nice place to discuss around some beers (except ours will be proper beers ;).

So if you're around Brussels this day, feel free to join us!

As a good GNOME citizen, Empathy 3.0 will have to be able to build with GTK+3. As Ubuntu is not going to ship GTK+3 by default in its next release, we decided to stay compatible with GTK+2 for this cycle.

Empathy already built with GSEAL checks so porting was just a matter of playing with autoconf. Libraries linking to GTK+ itself have to be updated as we can't use GTK+2 and GTK+3 in the same process:

• libcanberra-gtk, webkit-gtk and libunique now have releases using GTK+3 instead of GTK+2 so all we had to do was to change the PKG_CHECK_MODULES calls to check for the -3 flavour of the libs.

• nautilus-sendto plugin has been ported as well since 2.90.0 but it breaks its public API so we had to do some #ifdef magic to stay compatible with older versions.

• Since 0.5.1 libnotify doesn't link on GTK+ any more but use GModule instead (Thanks Bastien!) so we just had to make sure that this version was used when building with GTK+3.

• Unfortunately clutter-gtk and champlain haven't been ported to GTK+3 yet so we had to disable champlain support for now. I hope to see a port of these libs soon.

During configure, we check if GTK+3 is present; if it is then we check for these new version of the deps. If it's not or if Empathy has been configured with --enable-gtk3=no then we continue to use GTK+2 and the old versions of the libs.

If you're interested in details, everything has been merged to master so you just have to look at Empathy's configure.ac file.

This should hopefully make all the distributions happy during the transition. Once Empathy 3.0 is released we'll drop GTK+2 compatiblity and will start using the fancy new features offered by GTK+3.

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

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.

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.

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!