Konversation 1.2-alpha5 has been released!

August 05, 2009

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.

Changes from 1.2-alpha4 to 1.2-alpha5:

• Added back “Do not ask again” checkbox missing in the rewritten invitation dialog that appeared in v1.2-alpha4. By implication, the dialog now also observes the “Automatically join channel on invite” option from the “Warning Dialogs” page in the configuration dialog again.
• Fixed problems reconnecting an SSL-enabled connection using a self-signed certificate.
• Fixed a build problem with KDE trunk (i.e. what will one day be KDE 4.4).
• Fixed loading and saving of the settings toggling the invitation and multi-line paste warning dialogs in the “Warning Dialogs” page of the configuration dialog.
• Improved wording of the description of the invitation dialog setting in the “Warning Dialogs” page of the configuration dialog to reflect that the dialog being disabled doesn’t imply that the channel the user was invited to will be joined automatically, as the user might have rejected the invitation when he got the dialog along with checking “Don’t ask again”.
• Decreased memory usage (the objects created for every IRC user encountered are lighter now).
• Initializing Phonon is now delayed until it is actually needed, resulting in less memory usage for those not using highlight sound notifications and less work being done during application startup.
• Fixed DCC file transfer problems with files larger than 4 GB on 32bit systems, along with some other correctness improvements to the file transfer code.
• Backlog loading is now more efficient.
• Added IPv6 support for DCC file transfers.
• The fallback default file name for unnamed files received via DCC now contains the date of when the file was received in ISO format.
• Fixed a crash when trying to perform a tab completion with an empty nicklist (i.e. shortly after joining a big channel, before its nicklist has been filled in).
• Channel nickname list updating is now more efficient and pleasant to look at. Rather than resorting the entire list after the addition of a new nickname, the nickname is now inserted directly at the correct position (using a binary search), avoiding a lot of CPU-intensive comparisons between nicknames. The same optimization is also done for nickname and user status (as relevant in case “Sort by status” is enabled) changes - rather than triggering full resorts, items are moved directly to new positions as necessary. Resorting after both new additions and changes was previously done only after a delay of one second (as part of a scheme to throttle the update rate to a maximum of once per second given how CPU-intensive it was), which meant that new nicknames would initially appear at the end of the list and move to the correct position only after one second, and that nickname and status changes were similarly reflected in the sorting only after one second - this delay has now been eliminated, making the nickname list much snappier in reacting to what’s going on.
  Note however that when more than ten events requiring an update to sorting occur within one second, a fallback to the old scheme of doing a full resort at a maximum rate of once per second, after an initial delay of one second, occurs, as this is believed to be more efficient in situations of very high activity (such as merges after netsplits). Thus the new scheme described above should be seen as an additional optimization for the common case.
• In addition to the broad strokes optimization described above, other minor optimization work has been done on the nickname list updating code, improving the efficiency of updates further.
• Fixed topic label text color not reacting to system color scheme changes.
• Added a ‘/dcc get [nick [file]]’ command to accept an incoming DCC file transfer request.
• Fixed a crash when using the ‘Insert -> IRC Color…’ menu item without there being any tabs.
• Nickname changes of the discussion partner are now announced in query tabs, provided the information is available (i.e. when one shares a channel with the discussion parther, so the server informs Konversation of the nickname change).
• Fixed building on OpenSolaris.
• The channel item context menu in Channel List tabs now has a “Join Channel” action, and the list of URLs extracted from the channel topic has been moved to a sub-menu.
• Increased use of the IRC icons found in recent versions of the Oxygen icon set.
• Fixed a bug causing the time a user went online not to be displayed in WHOIS information (provided the server reports it).
• Fixed close button icons not immediately appearing on newly-added tabs when enabled (a preferences change would cause them to appear).
• A significant revamp of the Channel List code, especially around the way the list data received from the server is being moved into the UI, has brought about significantly improved behavior. The application should now no longer be bogged down for extended periods of time while the list is being processed - in extreme cases, this could even lead to disconnects by timeout.
• The “Apply Filter” button has been removed from the Channel List interface. Instead, the filter is (re)applied automatically as its settings are changed, i.e. briefly after stopping to type into the “Filter pattern” field or after changing one of the spin- or checkboxes.
• Fixed the display of human-readable mode descriptions in place of traditional mode characters (toggled by the “Show raw mode characters” preference and only applicable when Konversation knows a description for a given mode char) being inconsistent between ‘/mode <channel> and ‘/mode <channel>/<user> +/-<mode>’ - separate, unequal lists of mode descriptions were being used; this has been unified now.
• Fixed the “Modes” tab of the Channel Settings dialog not using human-readable mode descriptions in place of traditional mode characters when the “Show raw mode characters” preference is disabled (as it is by default) and a description for a given mode char is available.
• Fixed the mode list shown by “Show Advanced Modes” in the “Modes” tab of the Channel Settings dialog not showing all modes announced as supported by the server.
• The Channel List, when hovering a list item with the mouse pointer, now shows a tooltip with the entire topic of the channel when it doesn’t fit the topic column’s width.
• Konversation will now display a warning dialog box when the user is trying to send a character not supported by the chosen encoding.
• When a message containing characters not supported by the chosen encoding is sent, the chat view will now display the ‘?’ replacements for those characters that are sent to the IRC server and thus seen by other users. Previously, the chat view would display the version of the message before this encoding step, and thus usually show the characters, as the Unicode character set normally used by KDE/Qt is considerably broader than many of the encodings that can be selected in Konversation. In other words, the chat view now accurately portrays what is sent to other users when a message contains characters not supported by the active encoding.
• The URL Catcher should now open considerably faster with long lists of caught URLs and mail addresses.
• The list items in the URL Catcher now have the same context menu as links in the chat view. Previously there was no context menu.
• Caught mails and mail addresses not coming from an IRC user (an example would be links contained in a server’s Message of the Day text) now have their “From” field filled in with the tab name instead of it being left blank in the URL Catcher.
• Fixed a bug causing the DCC Status tab to sometimes prematurely claim a transfer status of 100%, as well as an unrealistic transfer speed, when sending a file to another user. The transfer would go on until actually finished; merely the information shown in the interface was defective.
• Fixed log viewer tabs not observing the chat window background image setting.
• Fixed log viewer tabs not reacting to changes to the chat window background color or font settings.
• Fixed raw log tabs only applying the chat view background image setting on configuration changes, not when initially being opened.
• The removal of the frame around the tab widget is now exclusive to KDE 4.3. We do it by way of enabling document mode for the tab widget (which is new in Qt 4.5), which renders badly in versions of the Oxygen style found in KDE versions earlier than 4.3, and the workaround we previously applied to make it work even with those older Oxygen versions had the unwelcome side-effect of breaking the application of color preferences to the input bar and nickname list.