The main feature in the new version is that it just handles notifications coming from well-known applications: Empathy, XChat, XChat-GNOME, Pidgin and notify-send. Handling the Empathy notifications is easy because they are well integrated with the shell, but the other notifications required some hack because all the applications handle notifications in different ways. I did my best to make the notifications as useful as possible, similar to the Empathy ones, but there are some small limitations.
Some of the handled applications require plugins to show notification bubbles:

• Pidgin: Click on the “Tools” menu and then “Plug-ins”. Make sure that the “Libnotify Popups” plugin is enabled. If the plugin is not in the list it means you need to install it. On Debian the package is called “pidgin-libnotify”, other distros should have a package with a similar name.
• XChat-GNOME: Click on the “Edit” menu and then “Preferences”. In the “Scripts and Plugins” tab make sure that “On-screen display” is enabled.
• XChat: Click on the “Settings” menu and then “Preferences”. In the “Alerts” tab make sure that “Show tray baloons” is enabled for both “Private Message” and “Highlighted Message”. If the notifications pile up in the bottom right corner of your screen and clicking on them does nothing, it means that XChat is using notify-send because it cannot find libnotify. I don’t know how to fix this issue on different distros, but I found a Red Hat bug explaining the problem.

Notifications coming from Empathy and XChat-GNOME

Is there any other common application that you would like to be handled by my plugin? The only prerequisite is that they somehow use standard notification bubbles (and this means I cannot implement it for Skype).

If you are looking for the source code, it’s in this git repository.

Note that the extension shows the number of conversations with new messages and not the number of messages; I don’t like seeing “2” up there if somebody just wrote me “hi” and then “how are you?”.

There is still a major problem with the extension. I wanted to be able to also see if somebody pinged me on IRC (I’m a XChat-GNOME user) so I don’t limit the count to active chat conversations, but I consider all the active notifications. I find this very useful to avoid missing something, but it means that the red icon will also appear every time banshee or rhythmbox change song. Suggestions on how to solve this?

Changing completely topic, I recently moved to a new home and, having a nice new kitchen (with dishwasher), I started cooking a lot again. I decided to start a new cooking blog called gnocchialpesto.co.uk to keep track of my recipes and share them with others. If you like food, in particular Italian one, take a look at it .

Gnome 3 and the shell look really great, but there are a few things that annoy me. My main complaint is that I keep missing IM messages because there is no visual clue that you got a message (unless you are staring at the bottom of your screen exactly when you receive something).
This problem will probably be fixed in the next version of Gnome, see bug #641723, but I wanted something now. That’s why I wrote a simple extension that just displays the number of conversations with unread messages. To install it, just clone the git repository and execute “make install”.

Spot the difference

The extension is unpolished, it does very little, the code is horrible and I didn’t pay any attention to usability; I just wanted a quick fix while waiting for upstream to fix the bug properly. Nevertheless, I hope this code will be useful for other people too!

Luckily GTalk developers were really cooperative and they agreed on fixing their servers and Will and Olivier already fixed Gabble too. The new version of Gabble (0.12.2 for the stable branch and 0.13.1 for the development one) should make calls work again on the desktop, MeeGo and on Harmattan (i.e. the N9 and N950) too.
For the N900 we don’t have any way to release updates, but Google will push an update to their servers (in the next week or two hopefully) with a N900-specific workaround.

Sadly video calls on the N900 will keep not working; the version of gst-dsp on the N900 doesn’t properly handle changes in the parameters of the stream .

Update: just to be clear, this affects only calls from GTalk to gabble. Calls in the other direction still work and calls between two devices of Gabble work too.

The Aviva stadium

Nowadays, Empathy uses libfolks to access contacts and to merge multiple contacts (called personas in Folks) into a single “meta-contact” (called individual).
On MeeGo, on the other hand, it seems that QtContacts (part of QtMobility) is the future. QtContacts is just an API and relies on backends for the actual access to contacts, so why not trying to have QtContacts using libfolks? In the last weeks I worked a bit on writing a QtFolks backed for QtContacts and a small demo written in QML to show what the backend can do.

The demo showing some of my XMPP contacts

Folks doesn’t just want to be a library for IM contacts, but a generic library to access all of your contacts. The next logical step was to add extra backends to access more sources of contacts.
If you use the Facebook XMPP server, you can already have access to Facebook friends and chat with them, but you don’t get all the information that are available through the web API. This is why I modified the Facebook libsocialweb plugin to also access Facebook contacts and added new interfaces to libfolks to expose this information. Moreover, we can rely of the Facebook ID to automatically merge the persona from the Facebook XMPP and the one from the Facebook web API into a single individual.

A contact with multiple IM addresses and information coming from Facebook too

The settings dialog with the extra ringtone buttons

For now there is only an Italian translation, but any help to get more is appreciated. Don’t worry, there are just 8 strings to translate!
To propose a new translation just go to the Transifex component page, download the .pot source file, add the translations to it, login to Transifex, and upload the file by pressing “Add a new translation” and setting as target file “po/XX.po” (where “XX” it the language code, for instance “fi” for Finnish, “de” for German, etc.). If you don’t know how to use gettext translation files I suggest using Poedit or gtranslator.

The custom ringtones application is now available both from extras-testing and from my personal repository:

Install from my personal repository
(follow the link on the N900 browser)

Update: I released version 1.0.1 containing some new translations: German (by NightShift79), French (by Alban Crequy), Brazilian Portuguese (by Humberto Sgrott Reis) and Swedish (by Andreas Henriksson). I will add more when I receive more.

Update 2: I released version 1.0.2 containing a crasher fix and some new translations: Albanian (by Ilir Gjika), Dutch (by Daniel Holsboer) and Spanish (by Fernando Borrego Polo).

Update 3: I released version 1.0.3 containing some new translations: Russian (by Misha Ketslah), Norwegian (by Stian Husemoen), Korean (by KwangHee Cho), Czech (by Pavel Fric), Hungrarian (by Balázs Bárány) and Romanian (by Bogdan Vernescu).

Install from my personal repository
(follow the link on the N900 browser)

This release fixes the last major reproducible bugs, but I’m sure there are more. If you find any please report them in the bugzilla explaining clearly what you are doing, what you would expect to happen and what happens instead. A log attached to the bugzilla entry is very useful to understand what is going on, and can be easily created by opening a terminal and giving this command:

ringtonedctl -d stop startwait > /home/user/MyDocs/ringtoned.log 2>&1

Then attach the ringtoned.log file that is in your documents directory to the bug report.

Anyway, I got a new component in the Meamo Bugzilla for ringtoned, so please report bugs there.

Update 2: I released ringtoned 0.2.2 that just adds some more debugging info to make my life easier.

After these changes I was really expecting to get very good performances, but it was still quite slow. My analysis was showing that, since when ringtoned gets notified from Telepathy of the existence of a new call to when it starts streaming to PulseAudio, less than 0.1 seconds passes, so why was it still slow?
At this point I tried using bustle to generate graphs of the D-Bus activity when a call is received. The graphs showed that the delay was not ringtoned’s fault, but a bug in Maemo causing a freeze that made the dispatching of new calls about 4 seconds slower when ringtoned was running. Somebody is now working on the bug and trying to figure out why it’s happening, in the meantime I’m working around it watching for new calls in a different way.^[2]

Ringtoned and the related packages are available in Maemo extras-devel under the name “Custom ringtones for your contacts”. If you don’t want to add the extras-devel repository (as it contains a lot of unstable software, you have been warned!), you can download ringtoned directly from my personal repository:

Install from my personal repository
(follow the link on the N900 browser)

The only known big problem left is that ringtoned breaks vibration, I will fix it in the next days/week.

Update: It looks like MyContacts is incompatible with ringtoned, so you cannot use these two programs together.

[1] The file is uncompressed in background, so you can still use any type of file for ringtones. Just notice that, when you update from a previous version, the first time you receive a call from a contact that already had a custom ringtone you will get the default ringtone and not the custom one as previous versions were not generating the uncompressed file.
[2] For people interested in Telepathy: the freeze happens if there is an observer running, even if at that point the dispatching to observers didn’t start yet! The (ugly, but effective) solution was to just listens to the NewChannels signal directly. When the Maemo bug will be fixed I will revert my code to use an observer.

Update: Note that you need to reboot or kill osso-addressbook after updating monorail to see the plugins again.