Long time without empathy blogpost. Lots of things happened in the Empathy/Telepathy world recently. Here I’ll present 4 new exciting feature of the upcoming Empathy 2.27.3. It will be an impressive release with not less than 49 bugs fixed!
Adium
The one year old adium branch got finally merged. This adds support for Adium Message Style themes in empathy. Themes are made of html and javascript, rendered using WebkitGtk. Of course webkit is optional dependency and old style themes can still be used.
Unfortunately all themes are not totally supported yet. Please check our wiki page for more information.
Geolocalisation
Another long standing branch got merged into Empathy master to add geoclue and libchamplain support. That means that you can now publish your position to your contacts. Your position can be calculater based on a connected GPS, based on your IP, or set manually to a postal address. You can of course tweak Empathy preferences to not publish the exact position for privacy.
If you have contacts publishing their position in your contact list, you’ll be able to see a world map with a marker at his position. The map is rendered thanks to libchamplain and animated using Clutter. Of course the map data is provided by OpenStreeMap.
This was done by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin and he will blog soon with more details and mandatory screenshots.
Desktop sharing
Work has been done to share your desktop with your contacts. This is done by creating a Telepathy StreamTube with your contact and passing the VNC protocol through it. Telepathy StreamTube spec is now undrafted and considered stable.
Guillaume will soon blog with more details about this.
File transfer
And last feature: The file transfer support in Empathy got large improvements. It now support checksum to make sure the transfer succeeded, and soon will support resume.