Mirco Bauer: Smuxi 0.8.10 "Tracy" Release
As longingly awaited I am very happy to announce Smuxi 0.8.10 codenamed
"Tracy". During the development 8 bug reports and 15 feature
requests in 136 commits were worked on making this release
a major feature and minor bugfix release.
Notable highlights in this release are:
Integrated Spell Checking
Everyone knows the "how do you spell that word again?" situation and either you
don't care and send a possible typo or you go checking a dictionary which is
kind of annoying. The good news is: with this release you no longer need to do
that, as Smuxi includes automatic spell checking while you type messages.
The bad news is that this feature is currently limited to Linux builds, and thus
OSX and Windows build do not ship with it. The installers need to be extended
and I haven't found pre-compiled OSX nor Windows binaries for the GTK+ spell
checking library.
Favicons for Server Tabs
Distinguishing server tabs can be difficult, especially if you have plenty of
them. All server tabs have the same icon so you need to search for the right
name. I wondered why this issue doesn't happen so easily with a web browser
which usually also has lots of tabs open. Besides the page name there is the
favicon right in front. So why can't Smuxi make use of that simple but effective
technology? Well, now it does! You connect to a known network, and Smuxi
will download and show the favicon of the website. It just works and does
everything in the background for you.
Quick Join Bar
One thing that makes IRC really difficult for new comers is the important IRC
concept that channels are network specific. So what happens is people try to
find / join the channel they are looking for but on the wrong network. They
have to connect to the right server/network and then switch to the right tab,
before they can join the channel (using the /join command or join dialog). The
developers of Smuxi had a brainstorming session and came up with something that
should be easy enough for anyone to use and finally solves the issue: the
quick join bar. You know which channel you want to join and which
network, you enter the channel name, select the network from the list and hit
the "Join Chat" button and you are done. Now Smuxi will do just the right
thing for you and connects to that network if needed, joins the channel if
needed, or switches to the channel if you are already there!
Click here for a screencast of the Quick Join Bar in action
Indention of multi-line messages
Messages on IRC and also Twitter are often longer than a single line in Smuxi
can show, thus it has to be split into a second line or more. The issue here is
that the continuation line looks cluttered because it doesn't align with the
first line. Here you can see an example for this issue:
Ewww, that looks ugly, doesn't it? I will make this one short, here is the cure
with indented multi-line messages:
Enhanced Text Frontend
The text frontend which is still in alpha state has received the following
enhancements: new /exit command, new /help command, regular and xterm window
title, and, several fixed crashes.
Enhanced Commands
The /network command by default shows now all connected and also
available networks:
The /connect command now allows you to connect by network name like
this:
/connect freenode
Updated Translations
- Portuguese (Pedro Ribeiro)
- Chinese Simp (Dean Lee)
- Danish (Joe Hansen)
- Swedish (Martin Bagge)
- Russian (Yuri Myasoedov)
- Croatian (Matias M)
- partially Polish (lukasznaw)
- Mirco Bauer (126 commits)
- Bianca Mix (translations)
- Dean Lee (translations)
- Joe Hansen (translations)
- Yuri Myasoedov (translations)
- Pedro Ribeiro (translations)
- Matias M (translations)
- Martin Bagge (translations)
- lukasznaw (translations)