Empathy’s meta-contacts feature get detailed

We revealed yesterday that meta-contacts is coming to the Empathy instant messenger and now one of its developer - treitter - has spoken more on how it all works….

How to link

A new ‘link contacts’ window allows you to quickly select alike contacts from different services and bind them together thus creating a new one-entry ‘meta contact’ for that person.

Auto-link

Better still treitter reveals that some of this matching will be automatic for users ‘with the same service ID (foo@example.org) contained in multiple accounts.’

He goes on to paint a halcyon dream for the future of meta-contacts in Empathy:

“…we're going to push as much into auto-linking as possible. My goal is that most users would never need to use this dialog. Until then, this dialog is how you designate meta-contacts in Empathy.”

Install

“lolwut? Install? Already?”

Yes peeps n’ peepettes this feature isn’t something obscure, far-in-the-distance & never likely to land but (for cautious bleeding edge types) available right this very second!

You can grab Empathy 2.31 @ ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/empathy/2.31/ (direct link to Tarbell here) or, if source isn’t your bag, keep on eye on the Telepathy Developers PPA (again, not for casual use).

Images, source | treitter.livejournal.com

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Meta-Contacts coming to Empathy next week: 1 person = 1 entry

With so many competing IM and chat services you end up using by accident or intention - from GTalk when you log into GMail to Facebook when you login to Facebook - it's by no means unusual to have 3 or 4 entries for the same person sat taking up space in your Empathy contact list.

A preferable solution would be to have all of Benjamin Humphrey's entries for Facebook, GTalk, MSN & Yahoo consolidated into just one listing, a la many smart phone address books. Well, wish no more!

MetaContacts in Empathy
In an announcement on the bug report asking for this feature Empathy developer Guillaume Desmottes has confirmed not only is this feature done and dusted it'll be available real soon: -

"Thanks to the hard work of Travis and Philip, Empathy master is now able to
link contacts together and meta-contacts are displayed in the contact list. I
think it's finally time to close this bug"

"For those wanting to test it, I suggest you to wait for Empathy 2.31.91 that
will be released on Monday. Feedback is of course welcome but please do check
if your bug has already be reported before opening a new one. They should be
filled using the 'Meta Contacts' component"

Thanks to Michael Martin-Smucker

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Elementary Empathy Theme

Talented designer MastroPino strikes again; yesterday we featured his wonderful Elementary Pidgin theme and today we're excited to share with you his equally-sublime Empathy theme.

Rock out with your, er, empathy out.

I much prefer Empathy over pidgin but hate the default icons it comes with (y'know, those coloured shapes...) so whether or not you use Elementary as a theme this icon set will surely improve the look of Ubuntu's default IM app on any desktop.

Download and instructions over @ MastroPino's deviantart page

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Ubuntu 10.04 in focus: Empathy

The default messaging client in Ubuntu 10.04 remains Empathy and although it has some detractors still smarting over the switch from perennial favourite Pidgin Empathy remains a fully capable and easy to use messaging client.

Lucid sees Empathy ramp up a gear in the usability stakes partly spurred on by the awesome work of the Ubuntu 100 paper cuts initiative that sought to fix the little niggles that tend to get over looked by developers.

Below are some shots of Empathy in Ubuntu 10.04 in action. If you haven’t tried Empathy for a while I urge you to give it a fair whack of the bat because it may just knock you for six.

First run

The default ‘chat account’ when running the account wizard is now Facebook chat. A smart move on the part of developers as Facebook is virtually ubiquitous. Having support for it baked in and preconfigured is definite a boon.

GTalk remains easy

Another widely popular chat protocol is GTalk by Google. Setting up your GTalk account in Empathy remains and deliciously straight-forward as ever.

Errors

The ‘error’ dialog shown to users when an account cannot connect has also been subtly changed to prove more helpful in addressing the problem, with a danger-red backgrounder to fully draw your attention.

MeMenu Applet

The MeMenu, aside from sporting some visually impressive new buttons, has added radio buttons to better help users see which status is currently invoked.

Ubuntu Theme

And although it may be old news the new chat style used in Empathy remains awesome.

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Empathy Gets New Default theme for Ubuntu 10.04 (And it looks familiar...)

It's the IM client everyone loves to hate but for all its perceived shortcomings Empathy remains a perfectly usable and roundly featured application - hence why it's default!

For Ubuntu 10.04 Empathy gains a new default theme (which we mentioned was in the works months back).

So, How does it look? Very familiar...



"Familiar? How so?" you may ask. We turn to Gwibber to see...

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Facebook Chat Officialy Coming To Empathy In Lucid

Empathy in Lucid will have a pre-configured option for adding a Facebook Chat account thanks to Facebook opening up their Facebook Chat protocol earlier this week. Chatting to your Facebook contacts via most multi-protocol clients is now a snap, and the Empathy devs are going to make it even easier by pre-configuring the set-up for you. We already posted instructions on how to log into Facebook chat from Pidgin and Empathy using Jabber/XMPP - although some users are having issues getting it to behave in Empathy. By adding official support for it in Empathy in Lucid users will find it as easy as whacking in their username and password. Roll on Lucid!

Thanks to om26er

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Facebook Chat in Pidgin & Empathy With No Plugins!

Facebook made their 'Facebook chat' protocol all awesome and nice today by adding support for the Jabber/XMPP protocol. This means you can have facebook chat in Pidgin, Empathy, etc without the need for buggy third-party plugins! Hoorah! Casey Ho, Pidgin dev supremo, blogged the following guide for adding Facebook chat in Pidgin: -

For the protocol type, select XMPP.

For the username, use your Facebook username. (see http://www.facebook.com/username/)

For the domain, use "chat.facebook.com"

For the password, use your Facebook password.

Now in advanced settings set the following:

Uncheck Require SSL

Set connect port to 5222

Set connect server to chat.facebook.com

Empathy In theory the same steps should work on Empathy. Osliner posted the following steps for Empathy in the comments: - Jabber account Login ID: username@chat.facebook.com password: *****word No encryption, and everything else is empty or default. Make sure when you click "Add" in Empathy, that you then select "Reuse existing account" (Thanks to Karl)

Thanks to Ashutosh Rishi for the wake-up call and Casey Ho for the instructions.

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Elementary Empathy Theme

An awesome elementary theme for Empathy, oddly submitted for potential inclusion in Lucid.

The picture sells the theme better than typed words can. A must for Elementary fans. Download http://www.gnome-look.org/CONTENT/content-files/119449-elementary%20Empathy.zip

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Empathy Getting New Theme In Lucid

Empathy will be getting a custom theme for its inclusion in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. David Siegel, who works for Ubuntu's Design and User Experience team, posted the news on his twitter account, also mentioning that it'll be created by the designer of my favourite Empathy/Adium theme - 'Renkoo'. This news forms part of Round 4 of the "100 papercuts" push, with this round focusing on Empathy.

To find out how to install themes in Empathy with one click read our tutorial!

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One Click Install Of Adium Themes In Empathy

Oraerk on the Ubuntu Forums posted the following script, and i thought I'd share it with the wider world.

It allows one click installation of Adium themes in Empathy through the Adium themes website; You see a theme you like, click install and it’s done. No download, unpacking and moving – it’s all taken care of.

The Script

1) Open gedit (applications > accessories > gedit ) and paste the code from this link: -

• http://pastebin.com/f4bd48dc5

2) Save the file as adiumxtra-install somewhere of your choice (Perhaps create a ‘scripts’ folder in your Home directory?)

3.) Grant the script permissions (replacing /path/to/script/ with the correct path of where your script is): -

chmod 755 /path/to/script/adiumxtra-install
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/adiumxtra/command “path/to/script/adiumxtra-install %s"
gconftool-2 -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/adiumxtra/enabled true
gconftool-2 -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/adiumxtra/needs_terminal false

Themes

Now you can browse along the Adium Themes site (link) and clicking on the ‘Install’ button next to a theme will automatically install it in Empathy.

 

Notes

Do bear in mind that a lot of themes are only partially compatible with Empathy so you may need to try a few to find one that works! Be sure to check out the Adium theme compatiabilty chat over at @ http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Themes

Also note that you may need to restart Empathy for a theme to show up in the preferences dialog.

For support or questions oraerk asks that you post in the thread on the Ubuntu Forums. (Link)

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Enable Facebook Chat In Empathy

Emapthy can support any protocol that pidgin does - this includes facebook chat.

Whilst there is no user-end plugin framework for Empathy as of yet, there is a simple hack around to get Facebook chat working in it. Requirements You'll need to have Pidgin installed along with the pidgin-facebookchat plugin, too. (See here for that.) You'll also need to be running a version of Empathy that is 2.28 or later. If you're using Karmic, you should be all set! Enable Facebook Chat In Empathy First we need to remove the haze.manager file. be caeful with the command below and make sure you type it identical to how it is below.

• sudo rm /usr/share/telepathy/managers/haze.manager

Now we need to get some facebook icons for Empathy to use.

• http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/facebook_icons.zip

Once you've got them, extract the folder and navigate to the following folder with root privileges.

• gksudo nautilus /usr/share/empathy/icons/hicolour/

Now simply drop the correct sized icons (not the folders they are in!) into the corresponding directories before you.

Terminal time: -

• killall empathy
• pkill mission-control-5

Restart Empathy and you will now see Facebook amongst the 'add account' options!

The Current Draw Back

Annoyingly in the most recent version of telepathy-haze there is a bug when adding a facebook account that results in a crash. It's still worth enabling this for when the bug is squashed in a later update to telepathy.

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Karmic Gets New Sound For Empathy

Karmic Beta was today gifted with an updated set of sounds for use with Empathy.

I say 'Sounds', but i can only discern one new one and it's used when you get a new instant message in Empathy - Ubuntu's default IM client.

If you don't use Empathy or you can't be bothered to try and hear it, this is it: -

No other new sounds as of yet...

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5 Excellent Empathy Themes

One unique feature of Empathy is the ability to use Adium chat themes – which is great for those looking to have a different chat layout during IM’s.

Since Empathy is the new default Messenger in Ubuntu, here’s five themes to install and try!

Installation

To install any of the following themes you simply extract the downloaded archive and move the *.AdiumMessageStyle into the following folder (which you may need to create!):

~/.local/share/adium/message-styles/*.AdiumMessageStyle

Once installed you can start using your chat theme right away by selecting it from Preferences > Themes.

Adium Matte

Based on OS X’s iChat message layout.

Download: http://adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=4987

Ravenant Dust

A Empathy theme that blends in flawlessly with the Dust GTK theme.

Download: http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Themes/Ravenant_Dust

NoteBoard!

Quirky, but definitely unique!

Download: http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=6218

Modern

Sleek and minimal – great for similar GTK themes.

Download: http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=2158

Eclipse

This theme does have the ability to have different background, but i haven’t had chance to play around much with it yet to find out how!

Download: http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=374

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MSN Video & Voice Chat Comes To Empathy

MSN video and audio chat is now supported by instant messenger ‘Empathy’.

Empathy will be replacing Pidgin as Ubuntu’s default IM client in Karmic, so this support being released couldn’t come at a better time for users new to Empathy.

The new packages will be appearing shortly on the official Ubuntu Teletpahy PPA which you can add @ https://edge.launchpad.net/~telepathy/+archive/ppa (this also contains an updated Empathy and all of it’s dependencies.)

If you’re all set already – and running up-to-date version of papyon, farsight2 and empathy then you can grab the telepathy source @ http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/2009-September/003844.html

NOT ONLY BUT ALSO!

True MSN file transfer support is also due to drop very soon, too!

Huge kudos has to go out to the developers of this. I’ll shamelessly copy-and-paste their names and contributions here from Guillaume Desmottes blog: -

• Philippe Kalaf, Olivier Crête, Youness Alaoui and Richard Spiers,
• Youness, Ole Andre and Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne (Reverse engineering of the MSN protocols and its implementation in Papyon.)
• Youness (him again!) for the NAT traversal code in libnice.
• Louis-Francis and Jonny Lamb for the Telepathy layer in Butterfly.
• The Empathy team and especially Jonathan Tellier who polished the audio/video GUI

Pictures will be added as soon as a contact who wants to video chat signs on!

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