KDE Telepathy 0.4 -- feedback requested

[steelsnake]

Okay, another feedback post

System: Kubuntu 12.04 with backports enabled. Incoming friend request doesn't say which presence it's for, nor does it honor the "Deny" choice. On next boot the request is back, and I can't figure out for the life of me how to block it for good. Or how to flat out deny ALL friend requests.

This is with a little icon in the systray, looks like a small "person" icon with a plus on it. Right-clicking shows a little tooltip "Received contact requests" with a menu entry below "Request from ... >".

[blackpaw]

Could you elaborate? Which setting, and where did you initially look/expect to find them?

general Settings, such as my auto aways status, away message etc. To get to it I have to:

- Right Click the "Instant Messaging Presence" tray icon
- Choose Contact List
- Click the Config Wrench
- Click the General Tab

I'm not sure why I have to go through the contact list to get to general settings. I would have expected just to click settings in the first right click menu, but that just gets me the standard default Plasma widget settings.

Thanks - Lindsay

[d_ed]

I do find the settings painful to access, they are not accessed in a way consistent with the usual KDE ui. But once set, thats it.

Could you elaborate? Which setting, and where did you initially look/expect to find them?

[blackpaw]

Well that's not going to help fix it.
Make sure to try it again sometime. (and enable kwallet!)

I always use kwallet, that was the annoying thing - once a connection failed it would assume the password needed to be rentered.

However I have tried it again on a fresh install of 12.10 Beta2. Working *much* better, copes with connections dropouts fine, no more bugging me.

I do find the settings painful to access, they are not accessed in a way consistent with the usual KDE ui. But once set, thats it.

[liamdawe]

Well I only use GTalk on IM's and KDE Telepathy is sooooooooo much better than Kopete good work!

The main thing i don't get is the restore last presence on login, requires two clicks to put a tick in the box i only just realised that's why it probably wasn't logging me in on startup - BUG?

[steelsnake]

d_ed: Thanks for the replies, and thanks for the clarification.

IMO, conferencing (regardless of medium) is semi-important. I can't tell how commonly it's used of course. I think I can relate to blackpaws problem insofar as I too used to get a lot of connection notification popups on my laptop at home. Telepathy seems to want to connect regardless of network state. The way I "fixed" it was by disabling the notifications. This does not fix the root problem though: Whenever I start up my laptop (or work PC), telepathy comes up disconnected. It can't connect until either the wireless connection is up (at home) or the work LAN has authorized my PC (at work). Kopete seems to work in either scenario.

What's worse, it doesn't ever seem to auto-reconnect even if internet becomes available. I have to toggle "offline", then "online" to get it to reconnect. I can live with that, but I can see where it's a big hassle for people.

[d_ed]

Purged telepathy off my system.

Well that's not going to help fix it.
Make sure to try it again sometime. (and enable kwallet!)

[blackpaw]

Purged telepathy off my system. It seemed unable to remember my google & facebook passwords, every startup I had to wade through a dozen popups about being unable to connect and password dialogs.

I suspect it might have been down to me being on wireless. My connection doesn't activate until after KDE starts up. Perhaps Telepathy needs to be network state aware?

[d_ed]

Kopete displays the chat rooms in contact list when KTP doesn't.
Kopete has the "Auto-join" feature to automatically join favourite conferences when KTP does not.

Please open bugs at https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=telepathy
We don't have a lot of testers using jabber conferences, and I think it shows. AFAIK none of us developers do, not on a day-to-day basis. You need to help us help you.

[*]in Kopete I was able to join multiple conferences without closing the "Join conference" dialog.

Goes both ways.. one could easily argue "I had to close the join conference dialog each time I joined a chat"

[*]Kopete has a big list of actions to be attached to the shortcuts; the most beautiful one I used in Kopete is "read last message" - haven't found anything similar in KTP.

Again please open up bugs on anything specific, such as this. (don't just say "implement all the shortcuts Kopete has" as that is not helpful )

[*]Default chat window style doesn't show the contact's name - just the photo (if any). The simple one is more useful but...

There are literally hundreds of themes, http://community.kde.org/Real-Time_C..._Window/Themes click on the little wand under "install".
We can't have a default that pleases absolutely everyone. The name is at the top, so it's never been brought up as an issue. For groups it should automatically change.

[*]Haven't found how to manage statuses for each protocol - i.e., when I am logged in with a few Jabber accounts, I'm unable to log out from one of them, etc.

There is a hidden option. open ~/.kde/share/config/ktp-contactlistrc

under the group [GUI]
have the line
selected_presence_chooser=individual

This is hidden for a reason, but it is something we will fix.

[d_ed]

Talking of Telepathy 0.5.0... dropping IRC support? Really? Seriously? Why would I want to run 2 clients when the whole point of a unified IM client is to run _one_ client? Granted, if I need a scriptable IRC client I'll go for a full-fledged client, but for "IM" use I've always used unified IM clients like Kopete, Pidgin etc.pp.

(developer here, and I think I'm the one who proposed that change)

KTp is terrible in conferences. If you look at the post below yours almost all the criticisms are about conferences.

It's a better experience for you to use 2 clients (and deal with the hassle of that) than to use IRC in KTp where the support is really rubbish. If you look at the post below yours almost all the comments are about conferences. Partly our fault, partly the fault of the underlying IRC library. Every KTp developer was doing this, if we're not going to eat our own dogfood, we're not going to make you do it.

I don't want to be wasting our very limited resources when there are already very very very good KDE IRC clients, competing with ourselves. It would be bad for the user, and bad for my team having to do support and fixes away from where it's actually most needed.

This is a temporary decision and will be re-discussed next Akademy where we will decide to revert this, or continue this decision.

Hello.

I tried using new KDE IM Contacts (0.4) instead of Kopete and returned back in 15 minutes. Probably some things I was annoyed with are not the real problems but misconfiguration but unfortunately I was unable to solve them.
That's what I've got so far (only Jabber was tested):

1. Kopete displays the chat rooms in contact list when KTP doesn't.
2. Kopete has the "Auto-join" feature to automatically join favourite conferences when KTP does not.
3. in Kopete I was able to join multiple conferences without closing the "Join conference" dialog.
4. Kopete has a big list of actions to be attached to the shortcuts; the most beautiful one I used in Kopete is "read last message" - haven't found anything similar in KTP.
5. Default chat window style doesn't show the contact's name - just the photo (if any). The simple one is more useful but...
6. Haven't found how to manage statuses for each protocol - i.e., when I am logged in with a few Jabber accounts, I'm unable to log out from one of them, etc.

I believe there's a lot of awesome things in Telepathy - but as the every day user of Kopete I can't switch to anything different until the features I use are not available.

Please don't take it personal - my humble opinion is that it's too early to make it default in KDE and Kubuntu. I hope Kopete will still be available in PPAs after the 12.10 release.

[steelsnake]

Realizing that Telepathy is still very much extremely early beta and very far from feature-complete, here's my "gripes list", not sorted by any specific means:

- No easy way to view status of individual IM connections (Kopete has that in the bottom bar)
- Very bare and confusing scattered config. It took me forever to figure out theme support, buddy icon and so on. Not intuitive at all.
- As I understand it, for most protocols it uses libpurple? If so, there should be voice/video support. If it doesn't use libpurple or any other established library it really should. Voice in particular is pretty much standard fare these days.
- I might be missing how to do it, but... It doesn't seem to be possible to just open incoming new chats in a new window as opposed to the small and easy to miss tray notification. Especially easy to miss if the IM came in while being AFK.
- Telepathy doesn't seem to be network connection aware. The amount of messages it spits out is a bit nuts. That's for 0.4 - I think 0.5 has that fixed.

However, there's also a "likes" list:
- SSH client connection. Great. That makes support SO much easier especially since it works through NATed networks.
- Seems to be friendly to CPU cycles.
- Protocol support. I think it pretty much has all of them, though I can't comment on how well they all work or don't work.

Talking of Telepathy 0.5.0... dropping IRC support? Really? Seriously? Why would I want to run 2 clients when the whole point of a unified IM client is to run _one_ client? Granted, if I need a scriptable IRC client I'll go for a full-fledged client, but for "IM" use I've always used unified IM clients like Kopete, Pidgin etc.pp.

That's about it so far. To me, it's a wash at the moment. Neither Kopete nor KTP are prime-time IM clients, though KTP does seem to have some nice ideas whereas Kopete seems pretty stagnant.

[claydoh]

just installed, And Skype is broken http://s12.postimage.org/5cj20rsqj/snapshot6.png

How about support in Lancelot.

Voice and video chat for AIM, and yahoo..

Oddly, you need to have skype running for it to work, and you also need to install pidgin-skype which is poorly named as it allows libpurple, used by a number of im clients, to access skype. Which is probably why it is not installed by default at this time (it is also rather old, doesn't seem to be actively developed at a quick glance)

As to voice and video, well the im's have to allow that in third party programs, and seems to be rather difficult to do and maintain, so I don't see that happening any time in the very near future., unfortunately.

So to keep the thread a bit closer to topic:
For everyone trying it out, what makes or breaks KTP as compared to Kopete?? These sort of things are perhaps where the developers might take interest first.

I do believe Kubuntu is the early adopter here, and good feedback will be useful to pass on.

[SteveRiley]

KDE Telepathy stores passwords in KWallet.

Not sure about your Skype problem, sorry.

[vyperlinux]

I wonder how it stores its passwords? does it store them in plane text files like pidgin?