Telepathy Update – End of February/Start of March

A couple of weeks ago, I started an attempt to give regular updates on what’s going on with Telepathy development in KDE. Unfortunately, I’ve fallen behind already (thanks to a insanely busy fortnight), but hopefully I can catch up, so here’s a list of what’s going on at the moment:

1. Porting of existing Telepathy stuff in KDE to use the new library, telepathy-qt4.
2. Some work on the presence plasma applet and dataengine
3. Work on a protocol plugin for Kopete to be able to use Telepathy.

Now some more detail on those three things:

Number one is annoying but necessary. Although it doesn’t get us any closer to having full-blown Telepathy awesomeness in KDE, it needs to be done. The old telepathy-qt library (and tapioca-qt, which it was used in conjunction with) is unmaintained and seriously showing its age. It also has a horrible flaw – it is a synchronous API. Although synchronous API’s are nice to work with, they end up driving you mad in a situation where many API calls require slow network roundtrips behind the scenes. The result was slow applications with regularly blocking GUI’s. eugh. telepathy-qt4 is a new library that is currently under heavy development. It is fully asynchronous and designed with future extensibility in mind. Its got a fair way to go yet, but given the current pace of development that shouldn’t be long in terms of time. So, back to how this affects KDE. We are porting all existing Telepathy stuff inside KDE to use this new library.

On point number two,  Siraj Razick has done some great work on the Presence plasma applet and dataengine. They now allow you to set your presence as well as show it. The presence applet is still rather ugly, but work is ongoing to make it truly beautiful. Expect an update with pictures as soon as this work is complete.

Number three: Dariusz Mikulski (Polish only) has been working to bring the bit-rotted Telepathy plugin for Kopete up to date. Work is progressing fast with that – last time I tried it, I could create accounts, and bring them on and offline, and see my buddies list. Again, expect more updates on that as it evolves, hopefully with screenshots too next time.

So, in summary – lots going on, lots of busy people, but still loads more to do. And just in case you missed my post last week – if all this sounds really cool, why not join in the fun by applying for a Google Summer of Code project.

[Disclaimer: This blog post talks about applications that are incomplete and not available in released versions of KDE – in other words – the stuff being talked about here may break or disappear at any time… you have been warned]