Konversation 1.3-beta1 has been released!

May 22, 2010

Konversation 1.3-beta1 debuts a major new feature in the area of Direct Client-to-Client (DCC) support: An implementation of the DCC Whiteboard extension that brings collaborative drawing - think two-player Kolourpaint - to IRC. It also brings back the integration with KDE’s SSL certificate store the KDE 3 version enjoyed and expands support for auto-away to the Windows and Mac OS X platforms thanks to both recent advances in the KDE 4 platform and new code in Konversation. Interface tweaks, new keyboard shortcuts and many bugfixes round things out. Finally, Konversation now depends on KDE 4.3 and Qt 4.5.

Changes from 1.2.3 to 1.3-beta1:

• Konversation now depends on Qt 4.5 and KDE 4.3.
• Added support for DCC WHITEBOARD, bringing collaborative drawing to IRC.
• When showing the dialog informing the user about the local target file for an incoming DCC file transfer already existing that dialog now includes the sizes of the local file and the file the sender is offering up.
• Fixed a bug causing either an empty line or a few characters of garbage to be placed in the clipboard in place of marker/remember lines when copying chat text containing such lines.
• Fixed a bug causing quotation marks, ampersands and angle brackets in chat messages to be displayed as HTML entities in the OSD.
• The “Clear All Windows” action will now also resets the notification state of all tabs (i.e. removes active new message or highlight notifications from the tab bar).
• Fixed a bug causing the server responses to background data gathering via WHO (to keep the app’s idea of its own hostmask up to date, as well as optionally channel user info) to be displayed in tabs as if the user had made the requests manually after sending a ‘/who’ command without parameters.
• Fixed a bug causing a crash when sending ‘/privmsg’ without any parameters (did not apply to ‘/msg’).
• In previous versions, channel tabs opened in the background (i.e. while “Focus new tabs” is disabled, as it is by default) would considerably increase the minimum width of the window due to particularities of the Qt layout system. After raising every channel tab at least once it would then be possible to make the window much narrower. This unintuitive behavior resulted in confusion as to why the minimum width of the Konversation window would sometimes vary greatly. This has been fixed in this version, i.e. it is no longer necessary to have raised every channel tab at least once to achieve a reasonable minimum width of the window. This also means that joining a new channel is now much less likely to resize the window.
• Fixed a bug causing the status bar to become multiple lines in height when hovering an URL containing percent-encoded line breaks in the chat text view.
• Fixed a bug making it impossible to scroll the Advanced Modes list in the Channel Settings dialog when the user doesn’t have operator status in the channel.
• Fixed a crash when selecting more than one completed, failed or aborted outbound transfer in the “DCC Status” tab and clicking “Resend” in their context menu.
• Fixed a bug causing the human-readable mode descriptions used by default in channel chat text views as well as the Channel Settings dialog’s Advanced Modes list not to be translated.
• When the display of human-readable mode descriptions is enabled (as it is by default), the Advanced Mode list in the Channel Settings dialog will now show the respective mode characters alongside them. Previously, only the description was shown. This makes the list useful as a utility to look up the meaning of obscure mode characters.
• Fixed a bug causing both the default email client and the default web browser to be invoked when clicking an email address link in the chat text view.
• Added a built-in ‘/sayversion’ command that, as opposed to the bundled ‘/kdeversion’ script, can show the version of both the KDE Konversation was built against and is running on. It also outputs the information in a single message instead of several.
• Fixed a bug that would cause the second and following segments of a text so long that it has to be split into multiple messages when it is sent to be encoded incorrectly.
• The ASCII 0x1d character is now used to denote italic formatting of text rather than 0x09, to avoid the conflict with the tab character that is frequently pasted e.g. from websites with tables.
• Fixed a bug causing the server response to ‘/whois <nick> <nick>’ not to be displayed on many IRC servers when the nick in questions is not online at that time (this variant of the WHOIS command is also used by the GUI actions).
• Fixed a bug causing missing bans in the list in the Channel Settings dialog on certain (mostly older) IRC servers.
• The text in notification messages used to be wrapped every 50 characters, an old workaround for problems with KDE 3.x’s bubble notifications. This has been removed now since it’s no longer needed with modern notification frontends such as Plasma’s, and produces rather ugly results there.
• Made it possible again to initate DCC file transfers to a query partner by dragging files or URLs onto the chat text area of the query.
• When building against the KDE Platform v4.4.3 libraries, the auto-away functionality will now make use of the new KIdleTime library to determine user activity and inactivity rather than use its own code, the primary advantage being that KIdleTime is supported on non-X11 platforms such as Windows and Mac OS X. In effect, this means auto-away is now supported on those platforms, depending on the implementation level in KIdleTime. (The use of KIdleTime can be explicitly disabled by passing ‘-DUSE_KIDLETIME=false’ to ‘cmake’, in which case Konversation will fall back to using the original, X11-specific code and auto-away will only work decently on an X11 platform.)
• SSL support now integrates with KDE’s certificate handling again, as it used to in the KDE 3 version, made possible by improvements in the libraries of the KDE Platform v4.3 (the minimum version supported in this release) and higher.
• Not reacting to an SSL certificate validation error dialog in a timely manner should no longer result in Konversation locking up.
• In-progress automatic reconnect in the event of connection failure can now be aborted by using the ‘/disconnect’ command.
• Manually issueing a reconnect order to a connection currently inactive after having exceeded its maximum number of reconnection attempts used to result in a single connection attempt after which it would be announced that the maximum number of reconnection attempts had been exceeded again. This has been fixed: It will now make the number of attempts specified as the upper limit in the application settings.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the selection in the transfer list of the DCC Status tab to be lost when a new transfer was added to the list.
• Fixed a bug causing the information panel in the DCC Status tab to show information for a transfer other than the one selected in the transfer list after sending a file to oneself for the first time in a session.
• The frame that used to be around the main window’s tab widget when the tab bar was located either at the bottom or top position has been removed.
• Improved compatibility with freedesktop.org-compliant notification frontends other than KDE’s. Other frontends could previously show empty notification message contents due to non-standard content in the messages.
• Added an action to switch to the last focused tab, making it possible to quickly switch forth and back between two tabs. The default keyboard shortcut for this new action is Alt+Space.
• Added a “-local” parameter to the ‘/amsg’ and ‘/ame’ commands that limits their scope to the channel and query tabs associated with the same connection as the tab the command is issued in.
• Fixed a bug causing the order of networks in the server list dialog not to be preserved across application restarts.