Dennis Nienhueser All things Free Software.

Kopete in KDE 4.1: A Visual Changelog

With Beta 1 out of the door KDE 4.1 is nearly feature-complete: Time for a quick view at some changes and new features in Kopete. Ignoring bug fixes and changes "under the hood" for now, here's a quick visual overview of new features:

The new Status Manager greatly simplifies status changes for the various protocols supported by Kopete. It allows for a quick status (message) change, both available from icons at the bottom of the Kopete main window.

Still it's possible to fully customize status for different account types. Using the Status configuration tab in Kopete's Settings, you can strip down available status choices to just a few you are actually using or set up a complicated combination of different types and messages.

Chat and event notifications can become rather intrusive when they occur frequently. The notification system has been revisited to avoid unnecessary events and features a more versatile configuration.

Don't miss the "Configure Notifications" settings dialog when tweaking events to your liking:

Last not least a new widget to display Service Messages has been added. It is meant to display less important messages that do not need immediate attention.

Service messages can be displayed and hidden using the flag icon in the left bottom of the Kopete main window. A green flag indicates the availability of new service messages.

Popup messages now support emoticon rendering.

Furthermore emoticons are now rendered using the new KDE-wide Emoticons library. While emoticon themes could be added and deleted from within Kopete previously, the new KDE-wide Emoticon Manager (available from System Settings or directly from Kopete) supports customizing every emoticon in a theme with a nice dialog:

Not only the Emoticons manager, but also the Chat Style selection dialog is capable of quickly downloading new themes from the internet using the KNewStuff2 facilities.

More polishing happened at various places. Task manager icons no longer look blurry and systray icons make full use of the Oxygen style -- or whatever style you use, icons are now generated automatically from the current icon theme.

There are lots of other changes and new features not mentioned here, as well as numerous bug fixes and stability improvements. Just have a look yourself