drdanzs blog

KDE Telepathy in GSoC 2012

We had several good proposals related to KDE Telepathy for Google Summer of Code 2012, but unfortunately we only got 2 slots! But hey, we got 2 slots! That’s great! Thanks to Google for organising and sponsoring it.

The first accepted project is “Message Filtering Plugin System” by Lasath Fernando (shocklateboy92), the author of the chat plasmoid that will be released in KDE Telepathy 0.4. He will be mentored by David Edmundson and

“will create a completely asynchronous modular and extensible system that enriches messages before they’re displayed to the user. These includes embedding images and videos from links, Translating messages, (re)-formatting them nicely, reading out loud etc.”

The second project is “Enhancement to peer-to-peer DBus for Telepathy DBus Tubes” by Puneet Goyal. Puneet worked on the Payment Detection use-case of project Alkimia in Season of KDE 2011. I will be his mentor for this interesting project which aim is to make it even easier to use D-Bus Tubes from any KDE application:

“When an application connects to a peer to peer dbus tube, it must know what exactly to look for. Even When it registers for another object, the other side of the tube must know about it. So the ideas is to create a class that could ease the object to register and unregister on the DBus Tubes, and to provide you with an interface similar to the one as a DBus Server.”

We had to reject several good projects, because of the limited amount of slots, but if you are motivated to work on a project in KDE Telepathy you still have one chance[1]: Season of KDE (SoK)! SoK is similar to Google Summer of Code: you won’t be paid, but you will get a mentor, a very cool t-shirt and certificate! If you want to apply, you can have a look at KDE Telepathy ideas that we selected for GSoC but did not get a slot (“Telepathy setup for KDE multiplayer games” and “Collaborative editor“), check out some more ideas here or propose your own idea.

[1]Actually you have as many chance as you want to contribute even if you don’t want to take part to SoK! We have several junior jobs if you are (or want to become) a developer, and a few non-programming tasks that don’t require programming skill if you just want to help us!

Digikam Code Sprint @ Genova + Telepathy KIPI Plugin

This post was supposed to be published yesterday January 18th 2012, but I’m delaying it of 24 hours in support of SOPA STRIKE

Last weekend the Digikam Code Sprint was held in Genoa (Italy). Yes, I’m not a Digikam developer, but I live in Genoa and this was a very good occasion to implement something that I’ve being planning to implement for a long time: A KIPI Plugin for Telepathy. So before saying anything else, here is the mandatory screenshot:

Telepathy KIPI Plugin

Thanks to this plugin, you will be able to send your pictures and albums from digikam, showfoto and any other application using KIPI plugins. Most of all I wanted this feature in KSnapshot, and yes this is now possible.

This is something I already implemented in the past [1] but I must admit that having all the contacts in a menu was a bad idea, so I gave up at the time… So this time we have a widget instead that takes shows only the person that are online, that can accept a file transfer and there is a bar to filter by name (actually most of this is widget is “borrowed” from Telepathy Send File, written by David, so credits for that go to him). I think this solution is much better than the menu, but comments are very welcome.

Unfortunately the widget won’t be in KDE Telepathy 0.3 so you will have to wait for the 0.4 release, and then you will have to wait for the kipi-plugin to be reviewed by the digikam developers… Meanwhile it will reside in my clone repositories (I will update this post with the links as soon as the code is available)

P.S. Thanks to ALID (especially to Angelo, Stefano and Claudio) and KDE e.V. for hosting, organizing and supporting the event and to all the Digikam developers.

MSN+XMPP in KDE Telepathy

As Xavier already wrote on his blog,

Microsoft announced that they had added XMPP to their Windows Live APIs. Microsoft announced that they had added XMPP to their Windows Live APIs. That means that any Jabber client could connect to MSN using our favorite open IM protocol! No more closed protocol to reverse-engineer.

Since Gabble now supports it, I just had to add a little bit of magic to support the Messenger OAuth2 authentication in KDE-Telepathy Auth Handler and add a profile to the Account Manager. Microsoft implementation still have some problems (you cannot add/authorize new contact, yahoo contacts are not shown, etc.), therefore by default the “old” method will be used, but we think that it is important that people starts using it, therefore starting from KDE Telepathy 0.3 (that will be released the 25th of January) you will be able to use XMPP protocol with your MSN account.

It is important to notice that you can have just one MSN-XMPP account at the moment, so here is how to add it.

First of all, you have to add a new account from System Settings > Instant Messaging and VOIP > Accounts > Add Account > Others > choose the “MSN (using XMPP)” profile and click Next

MSN (using XMPP) profile

OAuth2 authentication is a little bit different from the normal authentication. You don’t have to set any parameter, just click “Finish” in the next tab.

Just click "Finish"...

Now the magic will happen and the Authorization Handler will popup with a dialog where you have to insert your Windows Live ID and your password, then click “Sign in”

Insert your Windows Live ID and your password, then click "Sign in"

Finally you will get another page where you have to authorize the application to connect, by clicking on “Yes”

Click "Yes"!!!

And you should be connected.

Have a nice chat!

P.S. Due to this bug, if you manage to connect the first time, but you fail later, try deleting the account and repeating those steps… [EDIT: Fixed before 0.3]

P.P.S. Thanks to Xavier for the support and the suggestions!

EDIT: MSN OAuth2 authentication requires telepathy-gabble >= 0.15.0

KDE-Telepathy + Service Monitor

Today I found this plasma applet named “Service Monitor“, I thought it could be useful to monitor telepathy services, so I played a little with it and I wrote a couple of XML files containing definitions for Telepathy and KDE-Telepathy services, and here is the result:

KDE-Telepathy Service Monitor

I find it quite useful, it allows you to choose the services you are interested in among the ones installed, monitor which services are running, start and stop them from the applet.
Moreover thanks to that I already found a bug in the auth-handler that doesn’t exit when it is supposed to do so, so I’m sharing the xml files hoping that they can be useful for someone else. If you are interested you can find them here: git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/ddomenichelli/telepathy-service-monitor, you just import the xml files from the “Manage Sources” tab in the config dialog for the applet.

P.S. All credits for Service Monitor go to the original author.

KDE-Telepathy Sprint (aka Woshibon) 2 – Day 3

Today was sadly the last day of the sprint. We had some more discussion, a short course by grundleborg about unit tests, a short walk around Cambridge after launch and a lot of hacking. Moreover we decided the new features that hopefully will land in the next release. We have a list of 22 cool features that we we want to implement before the 8th of October (soft freeze for Tech Release 0.2). And this list doesn’t include the stuff implemented and all the bugs fixed after the 0.1 release. Unfortunately audio and video call won’t land in the next release due to dependency problems (but if you are brave enough you will be probably able to compile the dependencies and the audio call ui from the git repository), and Nepomuk integration and contact merging will be delayed some more. However we will have drag and drop of contacts from the contact list to the desktop, integration with kwallet (a little hackish for the moment but that’s all we can do until the secret service will be integrated in kde), a new auth-handler for handling passwords and ssl certificates, auto away and now playing system, desktop sharing with contacts, and much more. Finally we will have some small changes in the git repositories and we plan to release the 0.2 release both as a set tarballs (one per module) and as a single tarball to help packagers in their work. We really believe that the next release will be awesome!

A few conclusive random thoughts about the sprint:

We were the same number of people last year at the sprint. However in the last year the team gained several new important members!
Opening new bugs is something that grundleborg can do damn fast.
Sprints are really funny, and at the same time you get a lot of work done.
Help is always needed! If you want to contribute, please join us on #kde-telepathy
I won’t to wear the same shirt for the next sprint. (See here).
Brasil and Australia are really far.
Of course thanks again to Collabora and KDE e.V. for sponsoring the event.
Nepomuk shall not die! Please support trueg and the Nepomuk project!