Well, I think I owed you this one 😉 Remember back in 2009 when I was working on KCall as part of the GSoC program? Well, it may have taken 2.5 years more, but I’m now pleased to announce that it’s finally in a ready-to-use state \o/ Don’t expect it to be perfect, of course. It still has a long way to go.

Here is the obligatory screenshot. Me on my desktop, calling myself on my laptop 🙂

A little bit of history

When my GSoC finished in 2009, there were 2 main problems with KCall. The first one was that the bits of the telepathy specification for doing calls (i.e. the “StreamedMedia” channel type) were problematic, not to mention that the API of the telepathy-farsight library, which was the only way to use StreamedMedia, was also weird and it took me too many tries to finally understand it (in late 2010…), which in simple words means that KCall was very unstable beacause it used the API in the wrong way (if there really was a right way to use it…). The second problem was that there was no telepathy integration in the KDE desktop, so KCall would need to have a proper contact list, account manager and other stuff that it shouldn’t have to implement.

In late 2010, the KDE-Telepathy project started evolving and we finally managed to make a first release last summer with the necessary components to use telepathy on the KDE desktop. At about the same time, work began on a new API for doing calls in telepathy, the so-called “Call” channel type, plus telepathy-farstream, the new and enhanced version of telepathy-farsight. It took a little longer than expected, but finally a few weeks ago, thanks to the awesome work of my colleagues at Collabora who engineered the whole thing, the “Call” API and telepathy-farstream were finished and released. Fortunately, last year I had already worked on porting the call-ui to the draft Call API, using the draft telepathy-qt Call bindings that used to be in the telepathy-qt4-yell module. So, now I only had to first update the telepathy-qt bindings to the latest and greatest API specification and then do the same with the call-ui, plus fix a bit the UI, which was way too ugly. And so I did.

The present and the future

The UI is far from perfect at the moment, but the engine seems to work reliably. I have many additions and improvements in mind. However, since I suck at UI design, I’d love having mockups of ideas from people that can actually design UIs. And I’d also love having other people to implement those ideas, since I’m a lazy man… 😛 (ok, I don’t really mean that). So, if you feel like helping (either way), this is your chance to get involved 😉

The current UI will be included in the next KDE-Telepathy release, 0.4, which is scheduled for next month. Be prepared.

Try it

So, if you can’t wait for the next KDE-Telepathy release and want to try this now, what you need is the latest ktp-call-ui from git master with all of its dependencies. To make a call, simply right click one of your contacts in the contact list and click “audio call” or “video call”. Alternatively, you can do this directly from the text-ui or the contact plasmoid. Note that older versions of those components also have audio/video call buttons, but they will try to start StreamedMedia calls instead, which will fail. Also note that calls require XMPP (jabber, google talk) at the moment, but SIP support is also on its way upstream.