LeechCraft

This time we are here with a couple of new plugins as well as a usual bunch of fixes and improvements in already existing modules. One of the two new plugins is Monocle Seen, DjVu backend plugin for our document reader. For now it's quite basic and ... [More] only supports, well, rendering the documents. Support for TOCs and similar stuff will come later. Then there is Launchy, a new plugin for launching applications and open LeechCraft tabs. It is UNIX-only and fetches the list of applications from the freedesktop.org desktop files. For now it only supports visual fullscreen launcher, some say it resembles Unity a bit: Launchy Another improvement worth noting separately is that Azoth Autopaste module has been upgraded a lot, so now it supports choosing syntax highlighting of the text that's pasted to pastebins, and the pastebin service itself can be chosen. Though, for now only codepad.org is available. The LMP audioplayer paired with LastFMScrobble is now able to fetch personalized recommended events. Of course, this is location-aware, so only events near you will be shown. It's quite easy to add support for other such social events aggregators, if any. And finally we synced our QXmpp fork with the upstream, pushing all the required patches! So now the following should be used to checkout sources: git clone https://code.google.com/p/qxmpp Among other changes: Core: support restaring LeechCraft from LeechCraft. Core: support setting startup password. Azoth: fixed a rare segfault where nick hash was negative. Azoth: leave chat view enabled when the other contact is deleted. Azoth: added "clear line edit" to roster filter. Azoth Vader: online/offline status handling fixes. Azoth Xoox: properly reconnect after account changes. Azoth Xoox: logging all data to file is now optional and is disabled by default. DBusManager: expose plugins like NetStoreManager via D-Bus. LMP: detect deleted files. LMP: tracks can now be removed from collection or even from disk via UI. LMP: properly re-add root paths on rescan. LMP: directory iterator now asynchronous in FS watcher. LMP: scale pixmaps to 48x48 in playlist, conserves memory a lot. LMP: play on Enter/Space/Return. LMP: support playlist searching. LMP: handle links in biography and similar views. LMP: fetch artist image for radio tracks. LMP: support banning current track. LMP: support deleting static playlists. LMP: support Phonon in non-KDE installations. LMP: "clear line edit" in collection and playlist filters. LMP: background blurring in QML templates. LMP: lots of small QML template fixes and improvements. [Less]

Only a week has passed since the 0.5.80 release, but we've already done quite a lot! First of all, radio support in LMP has been reworked, and a new plugin has been added, HotStreams, which provides access to lots of different radio stations, like ... [More] the ones on Digitally Imported, SkyFM, SomaFM and more. Then NetStoreManager has been improved a lot and now better supports intuitive drag'n'drop operations. Also, the NetStoreManager's aim is a bit different today from what it was planned for almost a year ago, so the initial Yandex.Narod service subplugin has been removed as being obsolete. When we settle with the Google Drive support, Yandex.Narod will be replaced with a full-blown Yandex.Disk integration module. Third, the Liznoo power management module now supports FreeBSD platform, thanks to the contributions of a guy who chose to remain anonymous. And the settings tab has been also cleaned up a lot: subplugins' settings now reside in their parent plugins settings pages. There is also a bunch of other smaller changes: Core: use native file dialogs. Azoth: adjust variant chooser to contents. Azoth: fixed non-expanding smiles in smiles chooser. Azoth: MUC-aware groups sorting (MUC groups are now at the bottom). Azoth: optional separate MUC log. Azoth: fixed handling of tabs losing focus. Azoth: fixed several segfaults. Azoth Acetamide: support 307, 310, 320, 378 answers for UnrealIRCD. Azoth Acetamide: default IRC port is 6667 now. Azoth p100q: support in-place insertions instead of replaces. Azoth p100q: fixed last ID shortcut (it's Ctrl+Shift+P now). Azoth Xoox: detect and eliminate duplicate bookmarks. Azoth Xoox: fixed a bug in stanza generation in XEP-0016. Azoth Xoox: proper Cancel/Auth error handling. Azoth Xoox: don't reconnect on account nick change. Dolozhee: fixed reporting Core issues. Kinotify: configurable screen corner for the notifier balloon. LackMan: remove caching. LMP: added listview-based tabs switcher. LMP: added buffer status indicator. LMP: added collection statistics dialog. LMP: new collection items are added immediately. Poshuku: fixed error page template. [Less]

In this release we've mostly focused on the LMP and NetStoreManager modules, but other modules also got some interesting improvements. Also, it's time to announce the Monocle reader! LMP LMP, our music player, now has all proper logic for uploading ... [More] songs to cloud services, playing back uploaded songs, as well as, for example, fetching playlists from such services. Support for exact clouds is added via modules, in accordance with LeechCraft way, and for now only MP3tunes.com service is supported. Since the foundation is already laid, adding other clouds like Google Music would be much easier. Much like with device synchronization, one can also transcode the songs before uploading: Cloud uploading As one may see from this screenshot there is now a nice stats label below the playlist, so that one can know exactly how much songs he added and their total play time. Regarding playlist improvements, there are now different sort modes, so that one can now sort, for example, by file path or disable sorting at all. If the sorting is disabled, then it's possible to move and reorder tracks around with Drag'n'Drop, and the order of tracks addition is preserved as tracks are added. Among cosmetic changes are fixed background colors in QML elements and optional ignoring of "The " when sorting artists in collection. This way The Autumn Offering will be between August Burns Red and Behold... The Arctopus. And shortcuts for different actions are configurable now, too. The newer LMP also supports recently released liblastfm-1.0 which broke API compatibility with liblastfm-0.3. NetStoreManager NetStoreManager got initial support for the Google Drive cloud storage service: Google Drive Its core has been reworked so now it can easily support other similar cloud storage services like Yandex.Disk. For now only uploading and fetching the list of already uploaded files works, but in the next milestone it'd have the rest of features, as well as automatic folder synchronization. Since the original Yandex.Narod doesn't fit the new idea of NetStoreManager, its support will be removed after this milestone and replaced with Yandex.Disk. Monocle Though being available for some months already, this module only matured now enough to be announced. So, meet Monocle: our document reader. It already has quite enough features to use it on a daily basis for most tasks. It supports displaying one page or double-page spread, copying selection to image or text, scaling, width and height fitting, tables of contents, links, paginated navigation and printing. Monocle also integrates with the rest of LeechCraft so that it automatically opens a PDF document after a link to it is clicked, for example, in a browser or Azoth, and the document is downloaded. PDF document FB2 document Different formats are supported via different backend moudles, and for now only PDF and fb2 file formats are supported. There are two backends for PDF and one hand-written fb2 implementation. PDF is supported either via Poppler library or through mupdf library. The later is discouraged, since the mupdf backend supports not all features that are supported by Poppler backend, but that may be fixed some time in the future. And it is built as a static library, so some magic is required to make it work in LeechCraft. For example, see this bugreport. The main reasoning behind adding mupdf backend is that some claim it renders text much better than Poppler, but that's questionable. Azoth Azoth IM client also got its fair share of improvements. A new plugin has been added, Azoth BirthdayNotifier, which notifies about birthdays of contacts in user's contact list. The dates are taken from contacts' vCards, so this feature obviously relies on them being properly filled out. Azoth Xtazy now supports /np and /sharesong commands. /np pastes the name of the currently played song into current chat, while /sharesong uploads the song via plugins like NetStoreManager and pastes a link to it. The former works with both LMP and MPRIS players, the latter requires LMP only. This can be seen as yet one example of profits of LeechCraft architecture and integration. Azoth now finally displays user's avatar in tooltips: Moreover, tabs of conferences with unread highlight messages are now marked with a star sign ("*"). QXmpp, the XMPP implementation library forked by us, has been synced with the upstream. And seems like we're a bit closer to integrating our custom patches to QXmpp with the upstream version. Integrating means less mess, more chances to get into Debian repos, and is good and healthy for the Open Source community — why fork when we can cooperate? :) Other modules Aggregator now supports exporting feeds to PDF in addition to previously supported fb2. One can adjust the parameters of PDF export, like margins, fonts and font sizes, and paper size. The resulting PDFs are perfect for reading on eBooks like Amazon Kindle. The issue reporter Dolozhee now supports fetching issue categories from our tracker during issue reporting. This way one can assign a category to the issue being reporterd right from Dolozhee interface. Of course, there was a bunch of other improvements, so don't forget to check out our development digests if you're interested: #28 and #29. Packages and builds for supported distros and OSes will be available soon. Watch your package manager or our download page! The source archive is already available. [Less]

Since the last development digest we've did a bunch of improvements here or there, and added a couple of new plugins. The most exciting improvement is that NetStoreManager now supports Google Drive service, and its core was reworked so that now it ... [More] can easily support other similar cloud storage services like Yandex.Disk. For now only uploading and fetching the list of already uploaded files works. Since the original Yandex.Narod doesn't fit the new idea of NetStoreManager, its support will be removed after this milestone. The other important module adds support for the MP3tunes.com service in LMP. Only playlists, transcoding and uploading works, but this module (and corresponding changes in LMP core) lay foundation for other services like Google Music. The third added plugin is not that exciting, but has been requested quite a lot: it's a birthday notifier module for our Azoth IM client. It takes information about birthdays from contacts' vCards, and one can also configure the desired days on which to notify. Среди прочих изменений: Core: fallback to using external apps is now optional. Core: fixed showing main window in some WMs. Azoth: autoselect other resources only when a chat message is recieved. Azoth: tooltip is updated on avatar changes. Azoth: added default queries in Service Discovery. Azoth: MUC icon is preserved on MUC tabs on account state change. Azoth: MUCs with unread highlight messages are marked with "*" now. Azoth: more compatibility with full Unicode JIDs. Azoth: fixed a couple of bookmarks-related memory leaks. Azoth ChatHistory: dates with logs for that day are displayed in bold. Azoth ChatHistory: configurable amount of logs to show on one page. Azoth Xoox: synced QXmpp with upstream. Azoth Xoox: added icon for odnoklassniki. Azoth Xoox: birthday field is now editable for self vcards. Azoth Xtazy: added /np and /sharesong commands. BitTorrent: optional flags for peers' countries. Glance: nice Close button right on thumbnails. LMP: support different sorting styles in the playlist. LMP: support Drag'n'Drop and actions for reordering items in the playlist. LMP: all found lyrics can be displayed, not the last found one. LMP: faster prescaler for huge album arts in notifications. LMP: fixed compatibility with taglib built without ASF or MP4. NetStoreManager: other plugins can request uploads now. [Less]

Once again, last couple of weeks we mostly worked on LMP, or nice media player. What's also important, we've added some compatibility fixes, so BitTorrent can be built with Boost 1.50 now, and LastFMScrobble can be built with fresh liblastfm-1.0. ... [More] Adding support for liblastfm-1.0 revealed that a bunch of changes in it were like renaming a function here or a function there, and it's not clear why upstream did this in the first place: these changes bring no fixes, no new features, no improvements. Also, small, but nice news is that Azoth now supports displaying avatars in tooltips, like this: And here's the list of other important changes: Aggregator: support exporting feeds to PDF. Azoth: fixed a segfault when Ctrl+Clicking. Dolozhee: fetch the list of issue categories and assign issues to them. LastFMScrobble: expose some predefined radio stations like neighbour radio or loved tracks. LMP: support adding artists to wishlists to plugins like Otlozhu. LMP: support predefined radio stations from radio plugins. LMP: playlist stats below the playlist. LMP: configurable shortcuts. LMP: close the Album Art display on Esc or mouse click. LMP: added an option to ignore "The " when sorting artists (this way The Autumn Offering will be between August Burns Red and Behold... The Arctopus). LMP: URLs are displayed in playlist instead of just the string "URL". LMP: fixed background in QMLs. LMP: more file types are now supported. Otlozhu: support adding tasks from other plugins. Vrooby: fixed a segfault on startup on some systems. [Less]

Today LeechCraft 0.5.75 "This Glorious Nightmare" is released! Just like in the previous release, we mostly focused on LMP module, which is our collection-oriented music player. For example, it now supports music collection uploading to portable ... [More] media players. Files can also be set to converted from lossless formats like FLACs to lossy but much smaller ones (in terms of file size) like Ogg Vorbis. One can also select the desired directory layout and file naming when uploading files. The transcoder is highly parallel: in fact, it can encode as much media files as you have CPU cores, so it makes sense to upload music in big batches. It's also run with minimum possible priority, so one can just continue to do your work while the media files are being converted. All this stuff looks like this: Uploading progress Transcoding options For now only those media players are supported that don't require any special MTP or i-device-related protocols, but support for the latter ones is planned. By the way we will be glad to get your help here — from writing protocols support and synchronization modules to testing! Among other significant new features in LMP: Support for social radio stations like Last.FM radio. Obtaining personalized recommendations, recent releases by artists in user's library and biography retrieval. Support for MPRIS. Implementing collection synchronization support required us to make yet one more plugin: Vrooby. Vrooby is responsible for working with the underlying platform/backend to obtain information about removable storage devices. Other plugins then may query it to know what devices are available and where they are mounted, for example. It also allows the user to mount and unmount them via LeechCraft UI: Devices popup Several things were optimized a lot, thanks to the Intel VTune profiler being for non-commercial use (it's available in Gentoo's science overlay, BTW). Particularly, startup times were reduced a lot (especially if all the required libraries are already in disk cache), and some places like contact list drawing in Azoth, our IM client, were optimized. We've also worked hard on a couple of new plugins, one of which is Monocle, a modular document reader. It would be officially announced next time in milestone 0.5.80, though, so stay tuned! There was a bunch of minor fixes and enhancements in other plugins, so check out our development digests, where all this is listed in more detail: #25, #26 and #27. One can especially highlight two small but highly requested features: First, a nickname can be inserted into current chat tab message edit by Ctrl+clicking it in the roster. Second, Azoth ChatHistory module finally got a small calendar widget to select dates to view history for, and links in chat logs are now clickable. Packages and builds for supported distros and OSes will be available soon. Watch your package manager or our download page! By the way, the source archive is already available. [Less]

We have some good news: finally LMP is able to upload tracks from local music collection to portable media players! For now it supports only basic media players for which no MTP or iPod-related stuff is required. Support for MTP players and i-devices ... [More] will be added later. Of course, transcoding is supported, so that you can automatically convert big FLAC files in your local collection to a smaller lossy format like Ogg Vorbis. Anyway, it hardly makes sense to keep these large FLACs on players with such limited memory and typically crappy sound. For this to work, a new plugin has been introduced: meet Vrooby! It is LeechCraft's removable storage device manager, allowing the user to mount and unmount devices as well as aiding other plugins in working with such devices. Poshuku WYFV plugin has been removed as obsolete and unsupported. Among other changes: Core: tab bar can be moved to the bottom. Core: allow to disable resource caching via the new --no-resource-caching flag. Core: lots of optimizations. Core: fixed a possible segfault when there are no handlers for entity. AdvancedNotifications: fixed QML notifier on some multimonitor systems. Azoth: support inserting corresponding nicknames via clicking in the roster. Azoth Herbicide: block authorization requests as well. Azoth p100q: fixed recommending comments. Azoth Xoox: action for modifying self vCard in account menu. Azoth Xoox: fix for client connection handling, and a possible segfault. LastFMScrobble: added support for liblastfm-1.0. LMP: show full-scale album art when requested. LMP: support copying properties from the properties display widget. LMP: properly handle collections with unscannable items. LMP: fixed a segfault on certain loaded plugins combinations. [Less]

This week we got a license for Intel VTune CPU profiler for non-commercial use, so some stuff was heavily optimized. For example, LeechCraft now starts much faster, especially if Azoth has a bunch of items in its contact list. So, here's the ... [More] changelog: Core: added --list-plugins and --safe-mode options. The former just lists the plugins that LeechCraft has found, and the latter starts LeechCraft without any of them, allowing to disable those failing. Core: added Select All and Select None buttons to the plugin manager. AdvancedNotifications: added Urgent hint handler. Azoth: message text is stored in tab info, so it's recovered as well. Azoth: MUCs are rejoined on tab recovery. Azoth: added an option to alias KP_Enter to Enter. Azoth: even non-chat nicknames can be dragged now from contact list. Azoth: multiple performance improvements. Azoth AdiumStyles: support for SenderColors.txt. Azoth ChatHistory: added a calendar for choosing dates. Azoth ChatHistory: clickable links in History. Azoth StandardStyles: added a bunch of standard styles by Pendruk. Azoth Xoox: severely optimized load time, especially with big roster. LastFMScrobble: allow the user to choose the language of the info. Liznoo: hide the dialog after second click on its action. LMP: added support for MPRIS. LMP: directory iteration now optionally supports symlinks. LMP: track properties for Now Playing, FS, Collection and playlist. LMP: EnableScrobbling setting is now respected. LMP: some scanning fixes, a couple of segfaults has been fixed too. LMP: fixed compatibility with TagLib < 1.7. LMP: fixed some segfaults. Poshuku: removed tooltips generation. Sidebar: support embeddind dock visibility actions. TabSessManager: fixed Select All and Select None buttons. TabSessManager: fixed tab close handling. [Less]

Since the 0.5.70 release, we've added the Lads plugin, which provides some basic integration facilities with Unity, like displaying LeechCraft menu in Unity's Launcher. Except that plugin, we mostly worked on LMP, and had some fixes in other plugins. ... [More] So here are some changes: Azoth: updated contact list delegate. Azoth: highlighting groups is now optional. Azoth Xoox: always show JID in the vCard. GMailNotifier: if the username isn't set, the error is shown only once. Kinotify: support for X11 systems fullscreen detection. LastFMScrobble: support for requesting recommended artists. LastFMScrobble: support for Last.FM radios. LastFMScrobble: support for requesting recent releases in user's library. LastFMScrobble: some scrobbling queue fixes. LastFMScrobble: fetch artists biography. LMP: support radio sources & allow one to play radio streams. LMP: display personal recommendations for the user. LMP: display recent releases for user's musical taste. LMP: display biography of the currently playing artist. LMP: configurable transition time between tracks. LMP: current item is saved between playlist modifications. LMP: album art can be viewed in full size in some places. LMP: support undo/redo in playlist. LMP: notify when local collection is updated. LMP: on-start directory iteration is async now. LMP: many library scanning fixes. LMP: album time is properly reduced on items removal. Poshuku CleanWeb: fixed a segfault on premature frame destruction. Sidebar: LeechCraft menu is shown here now. TabSessManager: don't add empty tabs to the unclose list. TabSessManager: delayed session saving. [Less]

Today LeechCraft 0.5.70 «Hessian Blade» is released! The most significant change since the previous release is the all-new rewritten LMP media player, which specializes on audio and is collection-oriented. For now quite basic functions are ... [More] implemented, present in most other players, like, well, local collection, static and dynamic playlists (like "50 random tracks"), support for external playlists in pls, xspf and m3u8 formats, and different playback modes, like sequential, shuffled and track/album/playlist repeat. With modules like LastFMScrobble LMP supports scrobbling listened tracks to Last.FM (and possibly other similar services), fetching missing album covers and requests for similar artists. It also can use search modules to automatically fetch lyrics for currently playing song. Some screenshots of LMP: Collection Similar artists Lyrics Tray icon The following is planned in the nearest future: Support for hardware (USB-pluggable) players and synchronization with them. Support for audio streams and things like Last.FM radio. Integration with our RSS feed reader, Aggregator, for full support for podcasts. Fetching of personalized recommendations from Last.FM and similar services. Automatic fetching of tabulatures. Tags editor. Some help would be needed for implementing support for hardware players, from platform-dependend things to testing different devices. Among other changes the following can be noted: Core: "back"/"forward" mouse buttons make tabs switching. In the AdvancedNotifications module, responsible for rule-based advanced notifications, QML template and a couple of memory leaks were fixed. In our modular IM client Azoth: added support for /kick and /ban commands, smiles aren't replaced anymore in the middle of the words; added support for hiding and disabling accounts. Azoth Autopaste module which automatically pastes long texts to pastebins was migrated to the codepad.org service due to paste.pocoo.org's death. Azoth p100q which adds support for the psto.net microblogging service is now more compatible with Adium themes. Azoth Xoox, our XMPP protocol implementation, now supports adding, editing and removing phones and emails, and some MUC reconnection issues were fixed. Azoth Vader module, the Mail.Ru Agent protocol implementation, now supports assigning phone numbers to contacts, and some problems with authorization handling were fixed. Visual notifications provider Kinotify now doesn't show notifications if a fullscreen application is active. This helps to distract the user less if he's playing a game or watching a movie. For now it works only on Win32, and Xlib contributions are welcome! More information about other changes is available in corresponding development digests: #23 and #24. Packages and builds for supported distros and OSes will be available soon. Watch your package manager or our download page! As always, feature requests and bug reports are welcome, and we will be happy to get any help — from code (like hardware players support) to translations and artwork! [Less]