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)
New Translations
- Croatian (Matias M)
- partially Polish (lukasznaw)
Contributors
Contributors to this release are the following people:
- 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)
Thank you very much for your contributions to Smuxi!
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Update: Smuxi 0.8.10.1
About 2 months after the 0.8.10 release, Smuxi 0.8.10.1 with only important bugfixes and translation updates was released. This release includes the following 6 bugfixes: smuxi-server now honors the timezone of tweets, fixed a connection crash with InspIRCd-2.0 servers, quick join no longer opens another network tab, closing chats no longer crashes Smuxi sometimes, /connect irc.some-server.com works again and focusing the message area moves the focus back to the entry again.
