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!
38 rétroliens
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.
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]. :-)
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.
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
2 rétroliens
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. :)
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.
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.
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!
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
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!
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.
jeudi, décembre 4 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le jeudi, décembre 4 2008, 19:44 - Nerdzage
As promised file transfer is now available in released versions. Xavier released Empathy 2.25.2 Monday and I released telepathy-salut 0.3.6 Tuesday.
Thanks to Bigon these new versions are already packaged in our Intrepid PPA repo and in Debian experimental.
So feel free to test them and report any problem you could have.
vendredi, novembre 21 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le vendredi, novembre 21 2008, 16:59 - Nerdzage
After months of waiting, the file transfer support in Telepathy is finally there!
The spec was merged as a draft last week and the Salut and Empathy branches followed this afternoon. This means that this long-awaited feature will be available in the next releases of Empathy and Salut.
Lot of persons have been involved and worked very hard to make this happen. File Transfer was first started by Marco Barisione as a SOC in 2007.
Unfortunately his work wasn't merged directly because we were not completely happy with the specification and wanted to use the not-ready-yet Requests API.
This summer, Jonny Lamb resurrected Marco's work, ported it to the new FileTransfer API and polished the Salut and Empathy implementation.
I finally gave the last shot these last days by finalizing the spec, porting implementations to use the Requestotron and fixing last bugs. Xavier polished a bit the Empathy implementation and made it ready for merging.
Releases should be out shortly.
So, with the future Empathy 0.25.1 and telepathy-salut 0.3.6 you'll be able to send and receive files on your local network using Link-Local XMPP. Our implementation is fully compatible with Apple's iChat but not yet with Pidgin as libpurple doesn't implement the OOB protocol.
Next step will be to implement the File Transfer API in telepathy-gabble in order to be able to send and receive files over Jabber. If people are interested to contribute to Telepathy, implementing FileTransfer in telepathy-butterfly (MSN) or telepathy-idle (IRC) would very valuable contributions.
We are also working on the resurrection of the nautilus-sendto plugin too, so we'll be able to easily send files directly from Nautilus!
Thanks to Collabora and Google to have sponsored this work.
File sending in Empathy
mercredi, novembre 19 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le mercredi, novembre 19 2008, 01:26 - Nerdzage
Since yesterday I'm in Boston attending to the Sugar Camp. Today was dedicated to collaboration. I made two talks. The first one was an overview of the collaboration framework, how we use Telepathy in Sugar, etc. The second one was about our plan to improve Telepathy integration into Sugar and the cool new Telepathy features we are currently working on.
Both talks went pretty well and should hopefully lead to a better collaboration experience in Sugar in the near future.
jeudi, octobre 16 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le jeudi, octobre 16 2008, 00:23 - Nerdzage
I'm looking for a (small) computer that could be used as a media box with Elisa.
My requirements, pretty standard for this kind of computer, include:
- S-Video output (or possibility to have a converter to S-Video). HDMI too would be good.
- CPU fast enough to decode HD videos.
- As quiet as possible.
- 5.1 sound card.
- And, obviously, working fine with Linux.
So if anyone has good advice to share, comments are more than welcome. Thanks :)
mercredi, septembre 24 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le mercredi, septembre 24 2008, 16:33 - 3615 My Life
Since already 2 weeks, I moved to Cambridge, UK. That's a great opportunity to discover a new country, new culture, improve my sucky English, train my biking skills and, of course, to work in Collabora's Cambridge office. Things are going very well so far; I found a new house we share with Sjoerd, Will and my girlfriend Géraldine.
After 1.5 year working alone at my place, I really enjoy to have a real desk in a real office with others Collaborans.
vendredi, août 22 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le vendredi, août 22 2008, 16:43 - Nerdzage
Seems like mapping is the hot topic today, Pierre-Luc also announced a Gtk+ Map widget. Since he's not on Planet GNOME yet, I'll post the links for you all to see:
jeudi, juillet 10 2008
Par Guillaume Desmottes le jeudi, juillet 10 2008, 12:26
To all Guadecers, be sure to attend to the awesome Collabora party tonight. Don't know yet about the exact location but it will be on a boat!
edit: Seems the party will be around Kabatas
