Kopete 0.5 Released
October 16, 2002 (The INTERNET).
The Kopete team today announced the immediate availability of the next major version of the Kopete multiprotocol instant messaging client. In other not so interesting news the world is bombing and invading itself, our forests are almost gone, the Gnome Media project decides to join the War On Terrorism (see: Bush, US, PATRIOT ACT).
Nick Betcher discusses the major changes by stating that, "Kopete 0.5 is almost a complete re-write from the old, 0.4.1 version. Some of the major changes that the users may notice are unified menus, dialogs, preferences, away messaging system, and more." He then goes on to talk about World Domination with Kopete, but we decided to not fluster any other people, again, with such topics. After Duncan Mac-Vicar started talking about some of the new features in Kopete, like the redesigned ICQ plugin, he was also caught with a bottle of copete in his hands, but refused to comment on as to why we named Kopete, Kopete.
Kopete 0.5 has a completely re-written ICQ plugin for increased stability, faster messaging and connection speed, and future expansion for features like server-side contact list support, file transfers, and SMS messaging. Outside of plugin revisions, two new plugins were added: Gadu, supporting the Gadu protocol; and Winpopup, supporting communication in an instant messaging manner to Microsoft® Windows® machines via the windows popup messaging protocol.
In addition to major enhancements of the Kopete core and instant messaging protocol plugins, the MSN, IRC, Jabber, and AIM plugins underwent heavy bugfixing after many users reported bugs with the 0.4.1 release. Beyond popular belief, the Kopete team isn't perfect and the bug reports we received helped stabilize the 0.5 release. Dr Konqi is quoted saying: "Kopete is actually stable now! OMFG! I can message my Windows friends again!" After this extreme outburst, Dr Konqi was asked to return to his quarters to meet up with Mrs Kate for more bugreporting.
There is much more to come in the next few releases. Some things to look forward to are: File transfer in certain plugins, OSCAR AIM plugin, SMS messaging in the ICQ plugin, and more.
The Kopete team hopes everyone appreciates this release and we look forward to getting some useful bug reports so that the next releases will be even better. Enjoy!