Welcome to the first Gajim development news post of 2020. January’s development brought some improvements to Gajim’s plugin installer, better timestamps in conversations, and more. Feel free to join gajim@conference.gajim.org to discuss with us.
Changes in Gajim
On Linux, Gajim is able to gather infos about the music currently playing on your device. These infos can be published for contacts using the Personal Eventing Protocol (PEP, XEP-0163). Gajim’s MusicTrackListener (the one that gathers infos) received an update and some parsing fixes.
The timestamps shown in conversations have been changed to a new default formatting, where date and time values are always displayed. This also ‘fixes’ a bug where fuzzy time descriptions like ‘yesterday’ or ‘2 days ago’ were not calculated correctly (see #9272).
As mentioned in November’s post, a group chat’s features can be shown in the group chat info page. These features are now sorted consistently for better comparability.
Plugin updates
Gajim features a window for plugin management (also reachable via Ctrl+E), where you can activate, deactivate, uninstall, and install plugins (via ZIP). In order to install plugins from the catalog of available plugins, the ‘Plugin Installer’ plugin is needed. This plugin is also able to check for plugin updates when Gajim is started. This month, the Plugin Installer has been reworked. It now makes use of ’libsoup’ for asynchronous http connections, has a new config dialog, and received a lot of refactoring.
With the ‘Length Notifier’ plugin, Gajim is able to notify users when they exceed a specified message length while typing. This is useful when interacting with an SMS gateway or short message services like Mastodon or Twitter for example. The latest update enables the plugin to show the character count right next to the message input.
Similar to the music info publishing mentioned earlier, there is another way of letting your contacts know about which music you are currently listening to. The ‘Now Listen’ plugin (which got refactored this month) enables users to simply paste the track’s artist and title (and more) to the message input by pressing Alt+N.
Changes in python-nbxmpp
The code which is responsible for managing connections is in the process of a major rework. This should improve the connection speed when running Gajim on Windows for example. The rework is also a necessary step for connection handling in Gajim’s new Account Creation Assistant.