This month’s development revolved around polishing Gajim for the upcoming Beta of Gajim 1.2. Almost a year after the last release, a fresh beta is just around the corner. During April, we also implemented multi-account improvements and fixed some nasty bugs.

Changes in Gajim

Gajim has been offering multi-account support for quite a while now. If you set up more than one account, Gajim has to offer a way to distinguish one account from another, so that you know which account you’re using for the current chat. You can give your accounts custom names or, if you don’t, we have to display your account’s XMPP address somewhere. In order to give you a quick and easy way to see which account is being used, Gajim now offers a color for each of your accounts. As soon as you enable more than one account, you’ll see a colorized Gajim icon in some places (e.g. Start Chat, Chat banner of each chat window). Account colors are being generated using Consistent Color Generation (XEP-0392), which enables Gajim to generate the same color for your account on any system. A tooltip will help you remind which color is being used for which account. If you don’t like the color Gajim generated, you can of course select another one.

During this month, we tried to finish up on many projects started since the release of Gajim 1.1.3. This includes bug fixing for newly introduced features as well as polishing rethought workflows (e.g. group chat handling). It shouldn’t be long until the beta of Gajim 1.2 arrives.

What else happened

• Windows: don’t store passwords in the system’s keyring if started in portable mode
• Windows: redesigned notifications
• unified the colors used for status (now also configurable)
• added an invite button for group chats
• improvements for transport handling (IRC, etc.)
• updated app icon for Gajim Nightly
• better performance for the new group chat invite page
• Message Archive Management, Message Delivery Receipts, and Presence improvements
• fixed a nasty bug where history messages from multiple accounts have been mixed together (#9619)

Plugin updates

Gajim offers a Message Length Notifier plugin for people using gateways for services with limited character count (like Twitter or SMS). This plugin highlights the message input if a specified character count is exceeded. This month, the plugin has been completely reworked.

Using the Quick Replies plugin, you can answer your contacts even if you’re very busy. With the reworked plugin, you can set an infinite number of custom quick replies.

Changes in python-nbxmpp

python-nbxmpp now makes use of IDNA2008 for domain validation.

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