Is anyone interested in a new ICQ-Client?

[revelation]

Hello,

after switching to LINUX I was not satisfied with the provided instant messengers such as GAIM, Kopete, Licq, SIM and so on - I tried them all

There is a great program for Windows called Miranda which is clear, small, simple and extremely extensible due to its plug-in interface.
Especially the away message handling was great: one could use scripts in the aways, personalize them for each contact, see who was reading your away message and - most important - request them ACTIVELY.
That program was the only thing I really missed on LINUX and it was not possible to find an equivalent.

That's why I started to write my own ICQ-client following the philosophy "everything is a plug-in".
Initially it was only intended to be used by me, thus it lacked many features such as contact list management and avatar support and was only configurable by configs or *shame on me* direct code manipulations.

But it has developed and now includes nearly all features needed for everyday-work (even for non developers) - but the configuration is actually hard...

You might ask, why I'm telling all these things. Well, as my project has grown it could be useful for other people suffering - as I was - from the limitations of LINUX's instant messengers, but at it's current state it is perfectly usable for myself and I'm going to stop development if nobody else is interested in that program. If there is someone I will prepare the code for the eye of public ..


Screen shots:

contact list:
empty contact list after program start
contact list filled with offline contacts
contact info pop-up
switch your online status
contact list after connect and info pop-ups
contact context menu
change contact nick

message dialog:
normal view
close tab by click on the icon
tab context menu
typing notification
message received

other:
tray icon context menu
you were added notification
add user to contact list
search for user
upload avatar
history viewer
view the output of your away script
read contact status message
an away script


Features/specs:
- written in Python
- completely modular (the core is about 500 lines - rest plug-ins)
- plug-in interface (intended to be ) easy to use
- (current) GUI-plug-in written using wxPython - completely platform-independent
- avatar view/upload facility
- contact list management (adding/removing/altering contacts)
- pop-ups showing event messages (especially 'who-is-reading-my-away-message' )
- tabbed/non-tabbed message-dialogs
- message-styles individually configurable with HTML
- smiley support
- away-scripting based on Python (following the batteries included philosophy)
- history
- and much more (obligatory entry )


Please post your opinion.

Johannes


PS: If you are interested post also feature requests, please.

Great! I'd like to encourage your efforts.

I like its plugin-philosophy. It makes it easy to extend. Its platform-independence is another pre. By your screenshots, it looks mature. If it were available, I'd surely give it a try.

[jim]

you going to build a rpm ? i'll give it a whirl

[revelation]

Thx for the replies.
I'm working hard to reach a state where I can post a test-version, because trying yourself is much better than looking at those screenshots.

@jim: I don't think that I will create a RPM-package since I have no experiences with that....

[jim]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/D...gPackagesGuide

here is a start

[twiistedkaos]

This looks great, I'm not much of an ICQ fan myself but the fact that it's programmed in python means it's easily hacked and most likely could be modified to be other messengers with little effort. I'd love to give it a whirl

Revelation: If once you'd like to have a slackware package I'd be able to roll one and test it.

[twiistedkaos]

revelution; I am very interested in this project. I am willing to help any way I can. I can provide webspace for you on my host, and help you further develope your messenger. PM me if you are interested in webspace; ect.

~Josh

[revelation]

@sgjanssens: Thx for the offer! When the first version is out I'll mail you.

@all: I'm very happy due to the positive replies and offers. I'm working really hard to slay as many bugs as possible to provide a runnning test-version.

[BandC]

Looks nice. The one thing that will get a lot of people to try is to make it easy to install/uninstall. So an RPM package would go a long way. You could even have it included in Extras when it matures. However, you say it's written in Python. Does it have many dependencies or would a standard Fedora install be able to run it just by running the .py file? If so, you may not even need to create an RPM.

[revelation]

Hi all,

after some days of re-structuring and cleaning up the code I am proud to release the first version of pyICQ: 0.0.1Alpha

Installation:
Just download the archive, extract it somewhere (it contains only one directory named "pyICQ").
Additionally you have to install Python 2.4 and wxPython >=2.6 (www.wxpython.org provides RPMs for Fedora).

Running:
Execute the __init__.py in the pyICQ-directory with your Python-interpreter. (It's highly recommended to do that in a console, because actually there is no exeption-handling by the GUI.)
After having started you'll see the contact list window. By clicking on the red flower and choosing one of the provided status modes you can go online.
You will be asked for your login data: just input it and press OK. (ATTENTION: your password ist stored human-readable! Keep that in mind when using this version of pyICQ).

That's all - you should now be able to chat with your friends.


Known bugs/issues:
- you cannot go offline if you are online/away/etc. - the programm must be terminated to go offline
- sometimes avatar-upload fails - No workaround yet
- in the tabbed message-window the status icons are sometimes wrong
- adding contacts requiring authorization is not possible atm - (the console informs you about that)
- there is no direct connection from the search-window to the add-user-window yet
- initial show-up of history-/message-window takes about 5 seconds
- wxPython seems to have a bug: sometimes you'll see output like:
(python:19680): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_drawable_get_depth: assertion "`GDK_IS_DRAWABLE (drawable)' failed
(python:19680): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_pixmap_set: assertion `gdk_colormap_get_visual (gtk_widget_get_colormap (GTK_WIDGET (pixmap)))->depth == gdk_drawable_get_depth (GDK_DRAWABLE (val))' failed"
--> just ignore it

Have fun while testing...

I am very eager to read about bugs, feature requests and especially your impressions!
Johannes

EDIT
To download pyICQ visit pyICQ.revelation-soft.de, please.

[twiistedkaos]

Some quick bugs / things that could be improved that I noticed.

Special Character
IMAGE!!
Usernames that include special characters don't show up correctly, this isn't really a bug in your program bug the font you chose to use, maybe one that includes all special characters would be of better choice?

Show/Hide Offline User
This seems to be buggged for me, it seems that certain "people" bug it. For example:

  File "/home/Josh/Desktop/pyICQ/plugins/gui/CFrmContactList.py", line 339, in OnShowHideOffline
    self.setContactStatus(self, contact, contact.Status, False)
  File "/home/Josh/Desktop/pyICQ/plugins/gui/CFrmContactList.py", line 291, in setContactStatus
    entry.SetData(int(name))                # save the contact's screen name in order to identify it later
ValueError: invalid literal for int(): xSweetLouVX

This causes the contact list to "disapear"
IMAGE!!

Connection Error
Sometimes when you try to do tomany things at once: message / view details / request user information the messenger will get a connection error and you will no longer be able to chat even though it seems like you're sitll online. Fix: put a delay between when a user can do certain things.

Switching to offline mode
Even though you have stated this to be already bugged, it does disconnect when you switch to offline, maybe have it close the GTK window and taskbar icon bfore it disconnects.

Right-click on contact list bug
When trying to rightclick on contact list if you don't actually select someone you get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/Josh/Desktop/pyICQ/plugins/gui/CFrmContactList.py", line 226, in OnRightClick
    contact = self.getContact(index)
  File "/home/Josh/Desktop/pyICQ/plugins/gui/CFrmContactList.py", line 237, in getContact
    screen_name = str(self.lstContacts.GetItemData(index))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.6-gtk2-unicode/wx/_controls.py", line 4653, in GetItemData
    return _controls_.ListCtrl_GetItemData(*args, **kwargs)
wx._core.PyAssertionError: C++ assertion "wxAssertFailure" failed in ../src/generic/listctrl.cpp(3887): invalid item index in GetItem

An easy fix for this would be to check if the a user is selected with an if() statement, if no one is, then do nothing, but if someone is then display the menu.

Service crashes when using command over and over
WHen using "request user information" over and over(really fast) it complately messes up the item forever, I still havnt been able to fix it on my side, so I don't recremend trying this just take my word for it. removing and reinstalling pyICQ doesn't fix the problem. Havnt tried restarting computer yet tho.:

SNAC(15,02): requesting buddy information...  ok
Warning: SNAC family  0015  has no service  0001
2A 02 00 41 00 20 00 15   00 01 00 00 00 00 0A 9F
00 02 00 21 00 10 0E 00   29 D3 E6 09 D0 07 AE 04
B2 04 2E 7F DC 09

Fix: 10s delay between the last click of certain items, grey them out(disable) and then reable them after 10secs.

That's it for my bug testing for tonight, I'll do some more tomarrow.

[revelation]

@twiistedkaos: Thx a lot for your test!!! Great report!

Special Character
The problem concerning special characters is not only because of the used font: Sometimes the programm even crashes if one tries to send a character like the EURO-symbol. But using another font will be a start.

Show/Hide Offline User
Do you use AIM-contacts, too? They are currently not supported for the reason that their screen-names don't consist of digits only. - That's marked to be fixed.

Connection Error
That problem occurs due to the ICQ-server's limitations which are not interpreted by pyICQ atm. A simple delay will not help since there are special rules how many data may be send in time.

Switching to offline mode
This is a really ugly bug.... I'll fix it before releasing the next version.

Right-click on contact list bug
Thx for the remembrance - I have forgotten that problem.

Service crashes when using command over and over
That's the same bug as Connection Error. However: What do you mean by "completely messed up"? Could you post a screen shot?
The contact list is stored in an XML-file located at <pyICQ_main_directory>/data/icq_<your_screen_name>/contact_list. Post the messed up one, please. (Or the interesting part of it if you are afraid of your data )

Thx again for your efforts to improve pyICQ!

Johannes

[revelation]

Hi all,

I have created a small home page for pyICQ.

pyICQ.revelation-soft.de

Johannes

[twiistedkaos]

Originally Posted by revelation

Show/Hide Offline User
Do you use AIM-contacts, too? They are currently not supported for the reason that their screen-names don't consist of digits only. - That's marked to be fixed.

Service crashes when using command over and over
That's the same bug as Connection Error. However: What do you mean by "completely messed up"? Could you post a screen shot?
The contact list is stored in an XML-file located at <pyICQ_main_directory>/data/icq_<your_screen_name>/contact_list. Post the messed up one, please. (Or the interesting part of it if you are afraid of your data )

I figured out this was caused from testing revelation, I was temp banned for ocnnecting / disconnecting to much, porblem solved. Also, I don't remebed having any AIM users on my icq list, it's possible that I do have them though and just odn't remember and I did post a screenshot already. http://asm-community.net/blank.png

Edit
Yes I did have a few AIM contacts, I removed them and problem was fixed.