Welcome to February’s development news post. This month’s development brought a new look and flow to group chat invitations, some color improvements, and many bug fixes. Gajim Nightly is now also available as a Flatpak app.

Changes in Gajim

As mentioned in November’s post, the next version of Gajim will feature a different way of presenting group chat related actions to the user. The group chat invite mechanism has been completely reworked in order to provide a simpler group chat handling. We also added a search bar to make it easier to find contacts you would like to invite. Of course it is also possible to directly enter an XMPP address to invite contacts who are not in your contact list. Next step will be a rework of the transition from a 1:1 chat to a group chat when inviting contacts to a single chat.

Gajim Nightly is now available as a Flatpak app as well. The new Flatpak app is meant for those struggling with dependencies or for those who simply want a straightforward way of installing Gajim Nightly on their system. Be advised that nightlies can be unstable and backwards migration of your profile data may not always go well. Instructions for manually installing Gajim’s Flatpak app can be found in the Readme, and (conveniently) there are two new Flatpak install buttons in the Download section as well. If you like, you can also migrate your profile data to the Flatpak app.

To be able to assess a client’s capabilities and features (and those of servers as well), XMPP Compliance Suites are published every year. This year’s XMPP Compliance Suite is described in XEP-0423, which defines multiple application categories, such as Core, Web, IM, and Mobile. Both Core and IM categories are relevant for Gajim. In the Core Compliance Suite Gajim qualifies for Advanced Client. In order to be qualified for Advanced Client in the IM Compliance Suite, Gajim is missing just one group chat related feature.

What else happened

• ‘Invisible’ status has been removed (this has multiple reasons)
• Global menu (appmenu) has been moved back to the menubar (GNOME)
• Resource locking has been removed (#8971)
• Performance improvements for the Start Chat dialog
• Theme colors: improved both dark and light theme contrast and unified various colors
• Themes window: default style values are shown when adding a new setting
• Gajim now uses GSound to play sounds on Linux
• Group chats in the contact list now show the chat’s description instead of its topic
• Bug fix for DBus-related errors (#9978, #9868)

Furthermore, a lot of code refactoring and preparations have been done for the upcoming network connection rework.

Plugin updates

This month brought fixes for Gajim’s Flatpak plugins and some OMEMO compatibility improvements.

Changes in python-nbxmpp

As mentioned in previous posts, the code which is responsible for managing connections is in the process of a major rework. This should resolve many network related issues. As soon as the first bunch of changes is added to python-nbxmpp, the process of fixing things starts. You can track the progress if you’re interested.

As always, feel free to join gajim@conference.gajim.org to discuss with us.