Konversation / News: Recent posts

Konversation 1.3.1 is a maintenance release that improves program behavior and fixes defects, the most serious of which is a regression that unfortunately suck into v1.3, which causes data corruption or even loss of Watched Nicknames Online lists on application quit. Behavioral improvements are found in the handling of aborting automatic reconnection attempts after connection failure and RFC 1459 PING/PONG exchanges. Further notable bugfixes have been made to the Edit Network dialog, the handling of system color schemes and using the ignore list feature to ignore certain CTCP events.... read more

Konversation 1.3 debuts a major new feature in the area of Direct-Client-to-Client (DCC) support: An implementation of the DCC Whiteboard extension that brings collaborative drawing - think two-player Kolourpaint - to IRC. It also brings back the integration with KDE's SSL certificate store the KDE 3 version enjoyed and expands support for auto-away to the Windows and Mac OS X platforms thanks to both recent advances in the KDE 4 platform and new code in Konversation. Interface tweaks, new keyboard shortcuts and many bugfixes (including a number of new fixes since 1.3-beta1) round things out. Finally, Konversation now depends on KDE 4.3 and Qt 4.5.... read more

Konversation 1.3-beta1 debuts a major new feature in the area of Direct Client-to-Client (DCC) support: An implementation of the DCC Whiteboard extension that brings collaborative drawing - think two-player Kolourpaint - to IRC. It also brings back the integration with KDE's SSL certificate store the KDE 3 version enjoyed and expands support for auto-away to the Windows and Mac OS X platforms thanks to both recent advances in the KDE 4 platform and new code in Konversation. Interface tweaks, new keyboard shortcuts and many bugfixes round things out. Finally, Konversation now depends on KDE 4.3 and Qt 4.5.... read more

Konversation 1.2.3 is a hotfix release that improves upon an earlier fix, originally included in Konversation 1.2.2, that increases the reliability of Konversation's interaction with the D-Bus inter-process communication daemon.

Changes from 1.2.2 to 1.2.3:
* Increased reliability of interactions with the D-Bus inter-process communication daemon.

Konversation 1.2.2 contains a number of new features, such as support for passive DCC chat and amarok:// URLs, and a large amount of user interface improvements to various tabs (e.g. Watched Nicknames Online and the URL Catcher) and dialogs (e.g. Join Channel). When used with KDE SC 4.4 it supports the new system tray icon API. A sizable list of bug fixes round things out; of particular note is a change addressing the high CPU usage some users have experienced with Qt 4.6.... read more

This second release in the Konversation 1.2.x release series for KDE 4 adds a number of new features to the bookmarks system and support for reacting to changes in network availability as signaled by KDE's Solid, along with a number of fixes for bugs discovered since version 1.2 was released last month.

Changes from 1.2 to 1.2.1:
* Fixed a crash when cancelling the warning dialog that is shown upon receiving two incoming DCC file transfer requests using the same file name.
* Fixed a crash when using the "Clear Completed" action in the DCC Status tab after having previously used the "Clear" action to remove specific transfers from the transfer list.
* Fixed a crash when using the "Clear" or "Clear Completed" action in the DCC Status tab after creating a mixed selection of removable (e.g. completed, or failed) and non-removable (e.g. sending) transfers and the last addition to the selection was a removable transfer.
* Added a "Bookmark Tabs as Folder" feature.
* Added the ability to open the contents of an entire bookmark folder at once (aka "Open Folder in Tabs").
* Made the default generated bookmark titles more verbose: The Format is now "Channel (Network-or-Server)".
* Added support for reacting to changes in network availability as reported by KDE's Solid subsystem. If the network goes down, Konversation will now no longer make futile attempts to reconnect the affected connections. Instead, it will reconnect once the network comes back up.
* Variable expansion (%B, %C, %I, etc.) is no longer done in text segments recognized as URLs to avoid clashes with percent-encoded characters in URLs copied from web browsers, such as German umlauts.
* Made tooltips for truncated labels in the listview version of the tab bar work again with newer versions of Qt.
* Fixed a bug that caused the Watched Nicknames Online list to show the wrong or no tooltip when hovering a list item with the mouse pointer.
* The default destination folder for incoming DCC file transfers is now the "Downloads paths" configured in System Settings or the equivalent in other desktop environments (under the hood, this is a shared XDG setting).
* Making and then comitting unrelated changes in the Channel Settings dialog could cause unintentionally setting the channel's topic to an older version if someone else had changed the topic since the first time the dialog was opened or while the dialog was open, due to a bug in the code that avoids such external topic changes interfering with concurrent local editing of the topic. This has been fixed.
* The contents of the topic edit field in the Channel Settings dialog will now reflect the selected item in the topic history list until the user starts editing.
* Fixed a bug that could cause user mode changes occurring directly after joining a channel not to be reflected by the channel's nickname list.
* Fixed a bug causing the "Open File" context menu action for DCC file transfer items in the transfer list in the DCC Status tab not to work for incoming file transfers.
* Added support for RPL_HOSTHIDDEN.

Konversation 1.2 is the first release of Konversation for the KDE 4 application platform and desktop environment. In addition to preserving the full functionality of the KDE 3 version, this release offers a significant amount of new features and improvements to the user interface, performance, memory usage, energy efficiency, correctness and stability. Sum total, the changelog of all development releases since Konversation 1.1 and of this final release combined once again make for the longest changelog in Konversation's release history.... read more

After a pleasantly uneventful two weeks with beta1, this release candida-
te for our first KDE 4 stable release brings a handful of bugfixes that,
while definitely worth having, are fortunately none too scary. We thus ex-
pect the final Konversation 1.2 release to follow in the very near future.

Changes from 1.2-beta1 to 1.2-rc1:
* Fixed the scrollbar thumb not remaining at the bottom when the chat text
view is resized (such as when the window is resized or the input bar in-
creases in height after typing more than one line with auto-expand mode
enabled).
* Fixed a bug that could cause the progress bar for DCC file transfers not
to be updated when "Fast DCC send" was enabled.
* Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when resuming an incoming DCC file
transfer.
* Fixed characters that require the Alt Gr modifier to be typed (such as
the '@' symbol in German keyboard layouts, for example) not causing key-
board focus to move to the input line when typed while the chat text view
has keyboard focus and thus not showing up in the input line.
* Fixed a bug causing both the link and the marker or remember line to be
selected when a line is appended directly after a link that has just been
clicked.
* Fixed a bug causing the automatic scroll-down not to work when more back-
log is replayed than the viewport can show at once at channel join.
* The "Advanced Modes" listing in the "Modes" tab of the Channel Settings
dialog will now properly vertically expand as the dialog is resized even
to a very large height.
* Fixed a bug that could cause a crash while manipulating a channel's ban
list.
* Fixed a bug causing the moving of child tabs of a network tab in the
treelist version of the tab bar not to work using the keyboard shortcuts,
context menu actions or "Window" menu actions.

Konversation 1.2-beta1 marks the departure from active feature development for Konversation 1.2 and the entrance into the much-vaunted halls of bug-fixing-until-the-final-release, which we expect to materialize in early October. Until then, you can enjoy what this beta has to offer: HTTP and SOCKS v5 proxy support, further redesign of the DCC Status tab (many of you will be happy to find the minimum window size with the DCC Status tab open much reduced now), the long-awaited return of marker and remember lines and the resurrection of link dragging from the text display widget are of particular note, but the changelog has the details on a variety of other additions, plus the usual assortment of bugfixes, as well.... read more

Konversation 1.2-alpha6 is primarily a hotfix release addressing a serious DCC crash that we unfortunately only discovered after releasing alpha5. To sweeten the offer, however, it also includes a nicer DCC tranfer list that separates incoming and outgoing transfers into distinct categories, allows you to enable/disable individual columns and saves the sort column and direction across application restarts. Furthermore, Konsole tabs may now be renamed and there's also a fix for the handling of certain rare mode characters.... read more

Konversation 1.2-alpha5 features significant performance and memory usage improvements in several areas of the application, such as channel nickname lists, backlog loading, Channel List tabs and the URL Catcher - the latter two have also seen a fair number of interface refinements, making them much more enjoyable to use. The DCC subsystem has seen the addition of IPv6 support and a '/dcc get' command to accept an incoming file transfer from the input line. Various smaller additions and improvements have been made as well, including the usual share of bug fixes.... read more

Alpha 4 marks a significant milestone on the way to feature completeness for the v1.2 release of Konversation. New features in this release include UPnP NAT traversal support for DCC file transfers and chats, DH1080 key exchange support for Blowfish encryption and the ability to automatically split very long actions (i.e. usage of the '/me' command) into multiple messages conforming to the maximum length of an IRC message (this was already supported for regular messages for some time).... read more

This third alpha fixes a fair amount of annoying bugs encountered in day-to-day usage, as well as a serious bug in handling NAMES messages from IRC servers. We've also made some UI changes that we'd like to get your feedback on: We've changed the default tab completion mode to "Cycle Nicklist", and we've removed the frame around the tab widget when using the listview version of the tab bar.... read more

After just under a week's worth of adding back some missing functionality, polishing the interface and, of course, of fixing bugs, we've decided to bring you Konversation 1.2-alpha2. While there were no major defects discovered in alpha1, this one should yield an overall more refined user experience, and brings us another good step closer to our first stable release for KDE 4.

Changes from 1.2-alpha1 to 1.2-alpha2:
* Fixed nicknames in action messages using the message text color when nick coloring is disabled rather than the correct action text color as the rest of the message.
* Added back the context menus for nicknames and channel links in the chat view.
* Fixed the topic/info area in channels, queries and DCC chats, the nickname list in channels and the listview variant of the tab bar not keeping their sizes when the window is resized.
* Added missing actions ("Reconnect", "Disconnect", "Join channel ...") back to the context menu for server status tabs.
* Improved the placement of the "Join on connect" channel tab context menu item (back under "Enable Notifications" as in v1.1).
* Added the use of some of the new irc-* icons found in recent updates to the Oxygen icon theme.
* Fixed crash when joining a channel after having been blocked from getting the topic for the channel.
* Made the initial size of the "Edit Network" dialog more reasonable.
* Improved vertical size of and text alignment inside the input line.
* Added back support for drag and drop reordering of views to the listview version of the tab bar.
* Added back support for "surfing" in the listview version of the tab bar by pressing and holding the left mouse button on a view and moving the mouse up and down in the list view.
* Fixed mouse handling for close buttons in the listview version of the tab bar.
* Added back support for showing tooltips for truncated view items in the listview version of the tab bar.
* Fixed crash when receiving lines terminated by LFCRLF from buggy IRC servers (such as the shroudBNC IRC proxy when it relays a private message received while no user was connected to it).
* Worked around a Qt bug that has a text selection in the chat view that includes the last character in the view grow to include the new text when new text is appended to the view.
* Sound notifications for highlights now reuse a single Phonon MediaObject by enqueuing notification sounds rather than instanciate a new one for every notification, improving resource efficiency and hopefully taking care of some high CPU usage reports that seemed to be linked to Konversation's Phonon usage.
* Fixed the enabling/disabling of the "Find Previous" action.
* Fixed several bugs in the Server List dialog (sort indicator disappearing while dragging items, stray pixel in the top-left corner of the listview, hover decoration while dragging not always showing).
* Improved handling in the Identity editor dialog: When Konversation complains about one or more required fields not being filled in, the dialog will now put focus on the field when it opens.
* Fixed the 'Self' IP field of the DCC transfer details panel not showing a value when on the receiving end of a DCC file transfer.
* Handle DCC REJECTs. A DCC SEND is now automatically aborted when the partner rejects it.
* Fixed a bug causing the ordering of views to be partially reversed when switching from the listview version of the tab bar to the regular tab bar.
* Improved consistency of the context menu for links between the topic area and the chat view.
* Fixed repeated searches for the same search pattern (i.e. "Find Next") sometimes not working reliably with the chat view search bar.
* Minor code cleanups and performance improvements.

We're happy to bring you this first public release of the KDE 4 version of Konversation.

Despite the "alpha" moniker we've settled on for this one, mostly due to not yet being feature-complete (see below), this port has already been used productively by a fair number of people for some time and should be stable enough for general usage. In fact, certain features, notably DCC file transfers and auto-replace, are expected to be more robust than in Konversation 1.1.... read more

A user-friendly IRC client for the KDE Desktop environment.

We are extremely pleased to announce Konversation's newest major release, v1.1. Konversation 1.1 is a special release for us in multiple ways: It's our farewell to KDE 3, by way of being the last major release built upon that venerable platform. It's also our biggest release yet, in terms of the number and magnitude of the changes.

The additions and improvements in this release are both user-visible and under the hood. Some of the highlights are rewritten connection handling (robustness and correctness improvements, better support for IRC URLs, bookmarking and more), redone DCC with better UI and Passive/Reverse DCC support, a redone away system with the addition of auto-away support, redone and much more useful remember / marker line support, a new outbound traffic scheduler that is capable of aggressive throttling to avoid flooding while smartly reordering messages to improve latencies, great convenience additions like a "Next Active Tab" shortcut, and much, much more, along with a large number of bugfixes and tweaks to round things out. Note: All fixes made since RC1 are marked with a "[New since RC1]" label in the changelog.... read more

We are extremely pleased to announce the first release candidate of Konversation's next major release, v1.1. Konversation 1.1 is a special release for us in multiple ways: It's our farewell to KDE 3, by way of being the last major release built upon that venerable platform. It's also our biggest release yet, in terms of the number and magnitude of the changes.

The additions and improvements in this release are both user-visible and under the hood. Some of the highlights are rewritten connection handling (robustness and correctness improvements, better support for IRC URLs, bookmarking and more), redone DCC with better UI and Passive/Reverse DCC support, a redone away system with the addition of auto-away support, redone and much more useful remember / marker line support, a new outbound traffic scheduler that is capable of aggressive throttling to avoid flooding while smartly reordering messages to improve latencies, great convenience additions like a "Next Active Tab" shortcut, and much, much more, along with a large number of bugfixes and tweaks to round things out.... read more

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Konversation 1.0.1, a maintenance release featuring notable improvements for users of right-to-left languages (including new Arabic and Hebrew translations), further refinement of the user interface and application functionality, and fixes for minor defects found in the previous release.

* A bug that caused left-to-right text contained in lines determined to be right-to-left text to appear reversed has been fixed.
* Whether a line is treated as right-to-left vs. left-to-right text is now determined by the amount of each type of character in the line, improving the user experience in chats involving bi-directional text considerably.
* The "Edit Network" dialog has been refined for clarity and ease of use.
* A warning dialog to prevent accidentally quitting Konversation has been added.
* The Auto Replace list can now be sorted.
* The '/media' script command now sports improved player recognition, enhanced and easier configurability, the ability to distinguish between audio and video media as well as newly added support for kdetv. New '/audio' and '/video' command aliases have been added to expose these new abilities.
* The lower boundary of the default DCC port range has been raised from 1025 to 1026 to avoid conflicts with the commonly blocked Windows RPC port 1025.
* Dismissing an OSD notification by clicking on it will now also cancel the systray notification flash.
* A new configuration file option [OSD]OSDCheckDesktopLock has been added, allowing to manually disable the screensaver check in non-KDE environments that do not support it, causing the OSD not to be displayed.
* A bug that could lead to the "Switch to" sub-menu in the context menus of tabs not to be updated properly upon switching tabs has been fixed.
* A bug that caused the 'irc setBack' DCOP call not to function has been fixed.
* A bug that caused ampersands in the names of tabs not to be displayed and an immediately following character to be used as keyboard accelerator has been fixed.
* A bug that caused ignoring nicknames with '[' or ']' characters in them to fail has been fixed.
* Command aliases containing regular expression syntax can no longer cause built-in commands not to function.
* A bug that caused the Konversation irc:// protocol handler not to function has been fixed. Its compatibility with systems that do not use the GNU bash shell as default shell has been improved.
* A notable number of code quality improvements suggested by KDEs automated quality control service EBN have been implemented.

We are extremely pleased to announce the immediate availability of Konversation 1.0, a significant milestone in the lifetime of the Konversation project. This release includes major new functionality as well as a large amount of improvements to existing functionality, with an emphasis on user interface polish and overall reliability. Notable new features include a vertical treelist of tabs as an alternative to the traditional tab bar, auto-replacement of words in incoming and outgoing messages, an improved Channel Settings dialog now featuring a ban list, an optional expanding input box and many improvements to both DCC file transfers and DCC chats. Enjoy!... read more