Kopete looks for developers at the moment who could help pushing a KDE 4.0 ready version. In the meantime the competition wasn’t sleeping and released Skype 1.4.0 stable.
Kopete and KDE 4.0
Foe quite some time it looked as Kopete wouldn’t be ready for KDE 4.0. Since it was also made clear that Decibel wouldn’t be ready before KDE 4.1 some people expected to see a really new Kopete together with the Decibel release.
However, some days ago Matt Rogers asked for Kopete developers. He changed his mind and plans to release a Kopete version together with KDE 4.0.
As it looks like the major work which has to be done right now is bug fixing:
We’re in bugfix mode right now. Not sexy work, but useful nonetheless.
This means that the aim to push Kopete for KDE 4.0 is realistic – but that also means we might not see large feature improvements. At least not the ICQ v6 file transfer and the Jabber/Jingle audio support (my two main missing features of Kopete) because I’m sure it would be mentioned otherwise. But since such things might come in with Decibel it will be enough for now to have a Kopete which is “just” working as the KDE 3 does.
That reminds me of kmail btw.: it was once mentioned (at least on IRC I think) that it could find its way into KDE 4.0 as a pre-Akonadi version. Kopete would be similar in the way that it would be a pre-Decibel version – based on the release promises of Decibel.
Skype
Yesterday Skype 1.4.0 (Panacea) was released in a final version. Binaries are provided as usual for different distributions (would be interesting how they generate them, btw.).
Besides tons of bug fixes there are also several clean ups and improvements listed in the release announcement. A good example is the chat gui which is now much smoother and cleanr (but still unable to wrap words) or the support for Drag&Drop between almost all possible things.
A surprising thing is however the file transfer dialog – to me it looks pretty much like the GNOME dialog. It is of course programmed in Qt but it uses the Tango colours and icons. While that is somehow ok it is a bit irritating for someone who uses a strongly customized system.
Isn’t there a solution to just use the GUI’s open dialog depending on the started desktop environment? Would be interesting why Skype doesn’t use that.
Still, Skype 1.4.0 stable is a nice release and hopefully lays the foundation to get more features into the release – like video.
Closing thoughts
Writing about IM one things came to my mind: here in Germany most cellular providers now offer mobile flat rates: you pay a fixed amount of money every month and can use the cellphone as much as you want. While this often works only on landlines and inside the cellular network (roughly 25 €; for a all network flat rate you pay roughly 80 €) and doesn’t work for connections into other countries I expect that these prices will drop even more over the next years and months.
But as a result, will IM applications may even become less interesting? Of course, the text message sending part and the international connection part will still have its important position, but at least in Germany the original benefit of saving a huge amount of money will not be valid anymore soon. I wonder what the impact of this development will be.
/home/liquidat 
As long as mobile phones don’t come with full-size keyboards they cannnot really replace PCs for chatting. My SK65 (a nice phone nobody seemed to notice when it was being sold) has a full QWERTZ keyboard which is much more convenient than the usual number pad or the terrible T9. Now IF I had a phone flat rate I’d still use IM whenever there was a PC around.
It does seem silly for Kopete to work on some protocols that will be replaced by the telepathy components when Decibel gets released. Its a shame that 4.0 won’t have all the features KDE4 was so hyped to have. But as somebody said, software development is not powered by magic.
@skeith:
The way it probably works is that the Kopete protocols will be reworked to function as Decibel protocol handlers, therefore work/features not being lost, rather the protocols are being made generally available so they can also be used by other apps.
It seems that, if the pim apps won’t be ready for kde 4, that distros like kubuntu will have to include the kde 3 versions and the necessary libs. Is that what we’re looking at?
well, I don’t know about icq6, but oscar filetransfers should work just fine with icq5, aim, gaim, and possibly even adium. when I finished my soc project, kopete had better support for it than gaim did. 🙂 and someone else added some code after that, too.
I’m really looking forward to a day when the yahoo protocol would be better supported (file transfer at least) :|.
Using Tango icons is a way for cross-desktop visual integration. They aren’t GNOME icons.
Andreas: for that reason I concentrated on the voice part only.
Level 1: the last word is not spoken about the PIM part afaik.
Chani: are you sure? I was never able to use OSCAR file transfer. Is that code part of the current Kopete stable release?
Tomasz: Of course your are right – but you don’t have to use the Tango icons for that. Using the default icons of the system which are named in the way of the Tango scheme would be enough. But I’m not sure at this point if Skype does just reuse the Tango icons or actually relies on the icon scheming which would make it possible to replace the mentioned icons with the icons from the user chosen icon set.
> 1.4.10
Thats kinda very strange version number, where did you get that from?
berkus: From a typo.
liquidat: it’s only in kde4.
Ah, I see, thanks.