KMess - Live Messenger client for KDE / News: Recent posts

July 24 2009, the INTERNETS -- The KMess team announces today the immediate availability of KMess 2.0. This is the first stable release of the KMess 2 series, in development since January 2008, one and a half years ago. KMess 2.0 is our newest, best, most fresh release yet, and everybody is encouraged to upgrade to it.

The most obvious difference between our last stable release, KMess 1.5.2, and this release is the transition to KDE 4. Other than that, these things have changed:... read more

KMess 2.0 beta 1 released

We proudly announce the first beta of KMess 2. KMess 2 beta 1 brings MSN support for KDE 4 to a new level! In this release we've added a lot of new features.

The most significant additions to KMess 2.0 beta 1 are:
* Added Plasma Notifications
* Added option to configure toolbars and shortcuts.
* Added automatic reconnection after disconnections.
* Added support to send previously received winks
* Added option to blacklist annoying custom emoticons.
* Added 'Send with KMess' menu item in Konqueror context menus.
* Added Likeback support for better user feedback.
* Added IRC like commands in the chat window (/away, etc...)
* Added ability to export your contactlist.
* Improved emoticon panels and contact sidebar.
* Improved chat window status bar.
* Improved chat logging and addition of a log browser.
* Improved fallback to HTTP connections
* Improved offline chatting support.
* Improved KDE session restoring.
* Improved support for WLM 2009.
* Various user interface improvements.
* Updated server core protocol to MSNP15.
* Updates of various translations.
* A ton of bugfixes.... read more

While the development of KMess 2 is fully underway, the most useful things have been backported to a 1.5.2 release for KDE 3 users.

The most significant changes to KMess 1.5.2 are:
* Improved support for WLM 2009.
* Improved offline messages.
* Improved opening links in a webbrowser (especially for Gnome users).
* Updated some translations.
* Various bugfixes and smaller enhancements.

The KMess development team is very pleased to announce version 1.5 of KMess, a MSN Messenger client for KDE!

After a long time of development from version 1.4 first, and the 1.5-pre series after, we've been able to obtain a very stable and feature-filled version. This will also mark a great moment: KMess 1.5 will be the last version based on Qt 3 and KDE 3. The next major version will be based on Qt 4 / KDE 4, and we expect more exciting improvements in the near future. ... read more

KMess is finally considered stable and basic-feature-complete, though it's been stabler and more feature-ful than many MSN clients for a while now.

KMess Feature list

MSN Messenger protocol compatibility
Font and font color support, including the ability to force contact messages to appear in a particular font and color.
Full emoticon support, featuring a custom GPLed emoticon set and the ability to use different emoticon themes.
File transfer support, both sending and receiving.
Hotmail support, with new email notifications, the inbox count, and the ability to open Hotmail at the user's inbox or at the composition page.
The ability to disable and hide email information for accounts that don't use Hotmail.
Support for multiple user profiles.
Autologging, either at the setting page for from the commandline (with "kmess --autologin blah@hotmail.com" for example).
A contact list that can organize contacts by group or by online/offline status.
Groups show a count of the contacts online (i.e. "Friends (2/5)")
The user can specify particular contact images and sounds to be displayed when a contact comes online or in a chat.
The user can specify a name for a contact, overriding the contact's specified name.
The user can choose on a contact-by-contact basis whether the user should be notified when a particular contact comes online or goes offline.
KMess can show a contact's MSN profile, and open the MSN search pages.
In addition to the usual user statuses of "Away" and "Busy" and so on, there is the status "Away with Autoreply" that will reply to contact's chat messages with a user-specified away message.
The chat window has been redesigned with a new sidebar (which can be toggled with Ctrl+T) with an emphasis on contact images.
The chat window notifies the user that a contact is typing by "glowing" the contact's image.
Chats can be logged automatically and the chats ordered in subdirectories by day, week, or month, or not ordered at all.
Chats can be configured to show timestamps when contacts send messages.
A "compact" chat format can be used to remove extraneous line breaks and reduce the size of the chat.
The chat window caption in the taskbar alternates between lower and upper case to inform the user of a received message when the window is not on top.
Internationalization support, with translations in: English, Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, French, Catalan, Arabic, Korean, Norsk, and Thai
There is now a method, though not absolute, to tell if a contact is blocking you. If a chat is started with a contact that appears offline, you will be informed if the contact is offline or online and blocking you. ... read more

0.9.6 is released with the file transfer that everyone's been waiting for, even if it's a little buggy.

0.9.4 has been released and this version, unlike its unfortunate prececessor, should not crash. Let me know if it does, preferably with the stderr output attached.

I would invite anyone to try KMess 0.9.1, an MSN messenger chat client for KDE3. Check the home page for screen shots.