Summer of Code

During this summer, I've been working hard on Galaxium messenger, not only big and fancy features but also a lot of bug squashing.

The upcoming 0.8 release will contain all these goodies, so let's recap ...

• IRC Support:
  IRC will be one of several protocols that will be supported by default in Galaxium 0.8. The others are MSN, XMPP (Jabber), Aim and basic GaduGadu support
  
  
• Fast file transfers:
  If supported by the protocol, Galaxium 0.8 will be able to transfer files directly. By using Mono.Nat Galaxium is able to automatically map ports on your router and negotiate file transfers even when you are behind a router.
  
  
• Gnome integration:
  For now, only the simplest form of integration is available, namely automatic detection of GNOME proxy settings.
  
  
• Now playing:
  MSN Messenger on Windows added this feature years ago and Pidgin only supports it with additional plugins. Galaxium now supports it by default (Amarok, Audacious, BMPx, Banshee, Exaile and Rhythmbox). Other players can be supported by writing simple add-ons.
  
  
• Hello world add-on:
  One of our goals is to open up the development to other people. All information required to develop add-ons will be added to http://code.google.com/p/galaxium/wiki/Development
  Because our documentation effort has only started recently, it's mostly on a per-request base. If you want to develop a specific add-on, drop us a mail or ask us on IRC, we will gladly write a tutorial to point you (and others) to the right direction.
  
  
• Packaging:
  One of the things that turned up really great imho, are our precompiled packages. The list of supported distributions will certainly grow in the future, but the popular ones already have easy to follow instructions that you can find here.
  
  
• Audio / video conversations:
  One of my goals of this summer was MSN audio/video support, but since Paul (one of the other main developers of Galaxium) started working on this in June/July, I had to find another goal to fill the last couple of weeks, so I switched to libjingle (Jabber/XMPP audio conversations). Since I had no prior experience with Jabber, it involved a lot of research. Both of the protocol itself and of libjingle. The fruits of my research will be available on the SVN server late September, and hopefully stable enough to be included in 0.8

The next thing on my list is to enjoy myself for the rest of my vacation, so I'm well rested and ready to start working on our endless list of feature requests in a couple of weeks :)