Hi, yesterday we’ve released our second beta of our next-gen Live Messenger client for KDE!
We’ve as usual put a lot of effort on it, and I invite everyone who uses MSN more than other IM protocols to give it a shot!
As a sample of the countless improved things in this version, here’s a little list of changes:
- fixed disconnections after many hours of use.
- fixed losing KDE Wallet passwords.
- fixed typing notifications not appearing in WLM 2009.
- fixed resending messages already sent as offline messages.
- fixed searching for offline contacts.
- fixed time of arrival of offline messages.
- fixed contact list group sorting.
- fixed many memory leaks.
- improved the Chat History dialog and its integration with KMess.
- improved drag and drop support in contact list.
- improved handwriting message sending.
- improved the file transfers window’s behavior.
- improved chat session management.
- updated English handbook.
- 10 updated translations.
Obligatory shots:
There’s a lot more, specially under the hood; we try to keep KMess’ code easily understandable and well-commented so if you’d like to hack on it, I guarantee it’s very easy 
(I’ve actually learned Qt over KMess’ code, writing my first patch ever after less than a week, that had to mean something.. right? Right?! )
Beta 2 marks our very own KDE-style string freeze, so that you’ll be certain that your translations will be still valid when the final release will be out. [This is actually a call for translators! If you can, open up this page and help us, thank you very much]
To take a closer look to Beta 2, our screenshots page provides a nice visual guide on it!
On unrelated news, I’d like to spend a couple words on LikeBack: if you don’t know about it, it’s an awesome way to easily get feedback from your app’s users. We first learned about it from BasKet Note Pads, in its KDE3 incarnation, then I fell in love with it and ported it to KDE4 around October 2008, and fnally put it into action around February 2009. Since then, me and our Sjors have improved it a whole lot: having received our first comment on February the 4th, I can proudly say that as of today May 11th, we’re a tiny bit short of our 1200 reports mark!!
We’re really proud of this, a whole lot of people have helped us improve KMess! We’re listening, and you’ll find that KMess 2.1 will contain the vast majority of your requests and suggestions.
I think I’ll shortly blog about it in a deeper fashion, the 1.2 version released some weeks ago contains a whole lot of sauce, and I’ll explain LikeBack and its history more thoroughly, too.
As usual, if you have anything to say about KMess (or Likeback and you aren’t willing to wait for the next post!), the discussion is open both here and at our boards!