I am very pleased to announce the very first public release of Decibel:

Decibel
=========

Today's users are relying on communication software on their computer
systems.
They are forced to switch between different applications for the different
protocols and communication methods (text chat, telephony, etc.) they are
using. These applications usually are poorly integrated with each other,
forcing the users to interact with several applications to do simple things
like setting their online status to "away" on all communication channels they
are using.

Decibel is a realtime communications framework, meant to integrate services
like CTI (Computer Telephone Integration), VoIP (Voice over IP) and text
based
chat. This integration makes it possible to uniformly manage user settings
across communication methods. Decibel further enables developers to use these
communications technologies more easily, allowing for improved communications
and - ultimately - collaboration features in their applications.

Decibel consists of the desktop neutral policy daemon Houston and desktop
dependent components. These components interact with the user and its desktop
environment by providing GUIs for common tasks like eg. creating a new
account, storing passwords or contacting a friend. Using the Telepathy
specification (http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/) Houston manages Telepathy
compliant connection managers (implementing the various communication
protocols) and ties them together with Decibel's components to form what a
user perceives as one application.

Development of Decibel is supported by NL.net (http://www.nlnet.com/) and the
code is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1.


Version 0.1.0
===============

This is the very first release of Decibel. It is addressed to application
developers wanting to get a early glance at what Decibel will become. We are
very much interested in your feedback (and - of course - contributions;-)!

The release contains a the Houston daemon implementing a core set of
functionality, incl. client side D-Bus bindings to its APIs. All aspects of
the API are covered by a testsuite.

Decibel is implemented using the Tapioca
(http://tapioca-voip.sourceforge.net/) Qt bindings to the Telepathy
specification.


Sources:
==========

Get the sources at http://decibel.kde.org/index.php?id=90

The code is further available in the KDE Subversion repository:
svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/work/decibel

Binary packages are not available.


Known Problems
================

None.


To Do
======

 * Write some demos
 * Write a GUI to manage accounts
 * Improve APIs and functionality


Contact
=========

Web:          http://decibel.kde.org/
mailing list: decibel@kde.org
IRC:          #decibel on freenode.net

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions, feedback or want to
help building a communication framework!

I hope you find this interesting... and sorry for the crosspost!

Tobias Hunger
Senior Software Engineer

basysKom GmbH
Robert-Bosch-Str. 7 | 64293 Darmstadt | Germany
Tel: +49 6151 396-8769 | Fax: -9736

tobias.hunger@basyskom.de | www.basyskom.de




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