...still not the "release post" though. We're working hard on it, trust me. But as David already pointed out, there are still few bugs blocking the release, which we want to sort out first.

But let's take a look at some of the things we've been working on, starting with contact list (surprise!). First of all - we've bumped the required Telepathy-Qt4 version to 0.7.1, so be sure to update that one first.

Moving on - groups are in for good. Groups are independent of your accounts, so if you have the same group name in two accounts, all your contacts from these groups will be in one group, no duplicate groups etc. The idea is to be able to have contacts in several groups as that's quite natural (for example you can have someone in "Work" group as well as "People-I'm-doing-sports-with" group), but there is currently no way to do that :) The code is ready, we just haven't figured out how to do that in GUI in the right way. Plus we added a filtering of empty groups (shown when the offline users are shown) and online/offline users counting in the group header.

As a popular demand, we added a slimmer list. You can switch to it from the Settings (the wrench button). You can see it on the screenshot above.

We also switched from our custom blimey notifications to KNotification (ie. Plasma notifications) for errors and general information notifications. For that I wrote a small patch for KNotify, which allows people to set different icon per declared event in the .notifyrc file, which again is more natural for full desktop integration we're aiming for. More about this patch later in separate blogpost.

Daniele also did a great job on file transfers, we have patches merged all over the place (thus the tp-qt4 requirement bump). Currently it works only for Jabber/Gtalk and *should* also work with MSN. Unfortunately, the rest is not supported by Telepathy itself (or rather by its connection managers). Nevertheless, between Jabbers it currently somehow works, though not too many people reported success (if not crashes). But we're on it, no worries.

Sometime ago I also fixed the Start Audio/Video Call buttons, so if you have the telepathy-call-ui, you can also do a video/audio call. In a way. Ok ok, so it also crashes from time to time. Mostly. George K. is currently working on some QML-isation of the call-ui, so the stability will be improved later on. We'll probably ship our first release with these features disabled though.

During the Randa sprint in Swiss earlier this month, we fix an issue with adding new people to your contacts. Dario did a great job pursuing the issue and slashing the bug. Now when there are unconfirmed people waiting for your approval, the contact list will ask you every time you start it.

We also improved the accounts kcm part in Randa. Previously, when you'd miss some critical component, it would just fail silently. Now we have this shiny new overlay saying "You're not set up" (we took some inspiration from Akonadi...and some code too).

The text ui part is getting some new toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts for your better chatting experience.

And lastly, Francesco is working on a presence plasmoid (his GSoC project). It is already merged back in git master and works pretty well, so you can grab the code and go test it. And bug him for missing features. And then buy him a beer. And one for me too.

Oh and George G. finished the Nepomuk integration bits, so we're slowly starting to rewrite the contact list to use Nepomuk data instead of direct Telepathy data. Although the first release will be most probably without the Nepomuk integration as that will take us another bunch of weeks and we want to have something out already.

Everything is pretty usable already, so you can go and grab the code, setup is pretty easy, just follow the instructions here and if anything does not work as supposed, we put together a small troubleshooting guide.