[Kmess-devel] Release checklist / todo

[Diederik v. d. B. <vd...@co...>]

Hi everyone,

To give the project additional focus/direction, I'd like to propose the 
following "release checklist". This is a list of important issues to look at 
before 1.5 can be out.

Hopefully you can find something interesting in this list, and if you have 
time, see a way to fix it. Some of these issues are small left-overs from 
features that are almost implemented, others are nasty bugs that no one likes 
to encounter again.

If nobody objects, I'd like to add these points to some kind of "online 
roadmap" too, and re-order the TODO file to reflect the priorities. :-)
I've attached the details for every point below.

Networking stuff:
[1] Make the MSNP2P stuff independant of the switchboard (Diederik).
[2] Improve the success-rate of file transfers (Diederik).
[3] Integrate the MSNP12 patch from Richard (Diederik).

Unsolved issues:
[4] The main login dialog is confusing.
[5] Fix temporary accounts.
[6] Automatically save settings when pressing OK.
[7] Restore copy-text for the chat window.
[7b] Also update all existing chat messages when changing chat styles.
[8] Add file paths parameters to chat XSL styles.
[9] The "contact is offline" message is repeated for off-line users.
[10] Improve the documentation/screenshots (Jan, could you look at this?)

Other new features for the release:
[11] nicer effect for nudge
[12] receiving of custom emoticons
* basically something sexy/attractive that's easy to implement, but a 
eye-catcher to get KMess more in the picture.

As for a roadmap idea, some nice ideas for a 1.6 release (since the list is 
getting long otherwise):
[13] KDE-IM integration
[14] GetHotNewStuff integration
[15] now playing support
[16] improve the chat window ui
[17] other msn features like:
* sending of custom emoticons
* webcam receiving/sending
* winks receiving/sending
* background receiving/sending
* sip-audio receiving/sending
* http-connection method support
* drag&drop for contacts and dropping files in the chat window.

I'm eagerly waiting for your responses. :-)

Greetings,

Diederik


The details for each of the points:

[1] P2P Applications need to be stored per-contact, not per-switchboard. 
Multiple p2p applications can re-use the same direct connection, and p2p 
application may transfer their data over another switchboard.

[2] Support sending multiple files in all cases (old method or new method). 
Also use UPnP to control/detect port forwarding settings so file transfers 
work in more cases (UPnP library is already written, only not used yet, and 
not configurable yet).

[3] Richard sent me the patch, I just didn't take the time to implement it. It 
still needs some coding because it breaks the hotmail e-mail notification 
now.

[4] The login selectionbox contains all registered accounts. When you signin 
with an existing account using the login/pass fields, a "temporary" account 
is created. The existing account is not re-used, nor overwritten with the new 
password. Users get confused why they have duplicate entries in the accounts 
menu.

[5] KMess creates "temporary accounts" for users logging in at the main page. 
Users get confused because their settings get lost; the settings are not 
saved in some kind of profile. OTOH, the contact data is saved in 'kmessrc', 
while there is no profile to attach them to. Perhaps some settings should be 
grayed out, or you should get an option to "remember this account".

[6] Currently global settings and contactlist data is only saved when the 
application quits normally. The settings should also be saved when you change 
them (perhaps through a timer to prevent a lot of save-calls), so they are 
not lost after a crash.

[7] I didn't implement clipboard-copy support for the new KHTML-based message 
area yet. Afaik this requires a full traversal of the DOM to create a nice 
plain-text version of the chat message. Might be easier to implement together 
with [7b], so the array of cached chat messages can be re-used to create a 
plain-text copy of the chat messages.

[7b] Cache all chat messages in a QPtrList<>, so all chat messages can be 
re-styled when a different theme is chosen. Perhaps the same is also neat for 
changing emoticon themes.

[8] There is no way yet to include images/css-links nicely in chat styles. The 
base path needs to be transferred to XSL somehow, nicest way would be using 
<base href> for that, but this can only be used if [7b] is implemented as 
<base href> must be set once.

[9] When a contact is off-line, KMess still keeps sending "user is typing" 
messages. The "contact is offline" message get's repeated often in the chat 
window.

[10] The documentation is still written for KMess 1.0 / 1.1 (?) I think it 
could use a update/rewrite.

[11] I wouldn't mind if the window has the same shake effect, we could add a 
settings option to disable that. See: 
http://ariya.blogspot.com/2005/12/buzz-or-shake-my-window.html

[12] I understand Haris was working on support for receiving custom emoticons. 
I think sending can be in 1.6, because it needs some more thought for a good 
configuration/gui.

[13] KDE-IM integration allows copy-to-contact from konqueror and seeing 
online states in Kontact. See: 
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/3.5-api/kdelibs-apidocs/interfaces/html/classKIMIface.html

[14] Use GetHotNewStuff (GHNS) for emoticons and chat styles. Prepare the 
emoticon-packs to be downloaded by GHNS and alternatively be installed 
manually too. Perhaps create file-extensions/mimetypes so user can easily 
download and install .kmess-pack files.

[15] The now-playing information can be extracted from other players with 
DCOP. With MSNP12 we can display this in the user status field.

[16] only moved for 1.6 because I don't want to add too much delay to 1.5. We 
could still take some time to think out a clever design though.

[17] I expect these features are easy to implement in the time-span of one 
release. implementing them now could delay the release for 1.5 a lot.

-- 
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achieved by understanding.  -- A. Einstein