Through KDE hispano, and thanks to Pedro Jurado, I was made aware of Kopete's 0.7 release.

After playing with it for a few days, I decided to write a few lines about this software. This is a translation of an article in Spanish. I hope you can forgive me for my poor English ;-).

Hay una versión en castellano del artículo en KDE Hispano, i una altra versió en català a Bulma

Instant Messaging

When we hear these words, we think of a protocol that allows a client (a user) to receive chat-like messages (not longer messages as in emails), nearly instantaneusly.

The difference, when compared to IRC, is that you will not receive messages from "anyone" (e.g., someone connected to the same IRC channel as you), rather, you normally communicate only (at first) with those people that you have in your contact list.

There are a lot of IM (Instant Messaging) protocols. A very popular one, mainly because it was the first, is ICQ (`I Seek You`). Recently others have started to appear that are actually much more popular, like America Online's one, AIM, which is not very known here (writer lives in Barcelona), but seems very popular in the US. As far as I know, here and in latin-america, the most popular is MSN, which unfortunately, is the not very loved company's protocol.

As Carles has written (article in catalan), Jabber, is a standard protocol for Instant Messaging. This means that the protocol is a common protocol such as HTTP, FTP, or IMAP. The most visible advantadge with Jabber is the ability of using whatever program we prefer to use the protocol (the same as we can choose the browser that we prefer, or the email client that we most like).

In free software, we also have freedom of choice. For example, even when only using MSN, we could use Alvaro's Messenger, kmess, kmerlin, msn4lin, and others. Along that note, some projects started to include in their features support for more than one protocol. So, we now have GAIM, a very popular client for communicating with everyone, in a Universal Messanging System (article in spanish), or Kopete, which I will describe.

Features of kopete 0.7

• Support of many protocols using plugins:
  
• Jabber
• ICQ
• AIM
• MSN
• Yahoo
• IRC
• Windows LANs
• GaduGadu
• IRC
• SMS
• Features can be enabled or disabled at your convenience, also using plugins:
• Autoaway (changes your state when idle)
• Autoreplace (allows you change abreviated words for its complete form; totally customizable)
• Cryptography (use of GnuPG for making your messages more private)
• Text effect (allow customize colors, l4m3r writing, cAse cHAngEs)
• "Now listening..." (tells your buddies what music are you listening to)
• Highlight (plays sounds, changes text format, etc. when someone mentions your name, or some words you can choose)
• History (keeps a list of messages sent and received)
• Spell checker (correkts som misteiks ;-) )
• Translation (translates incoming and outcoming messages)
• Web presence (creates a web page with a list of your connected members)
• Kopete can be docked into Kicker's system tray (like Klipper).
• You can allow pop-ups to appear when someone logs in:
  
• Every protocol is managed individually through the icons below. This allows you be invisible (or away, or offline) to your msn contacts, and visible for the jabber ones.
• Supports a lot of smiley sets, you can choose ;-), and colors are very customizable (it supports also transluency), allowing you to choose one color to distinguish each protocol.
• A wizard helps you to create and manage each account easily.
• Offline login (everyone believes you are offline, but you aren't).
• File transfer.

Unfortunately, Kopete is not perfect, but many people are working on it :-). The IRC plugin needs to be improved, because it only allows you to connect to one server, and fankly, it needs to correct its behaviour a bit. Some details are a bit odd, for example, when pressing return, you start a new line, instead of sending the written message. It can be changed in your shortcuts very easily, but this is something a newbie is not going to find. There are also a lot of bugs.

The appearance of message windows is very customizable, but it is done in XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language), a very powerful and standard language, but it is not very popular, and it is not specially easy.

Definitively, Kopete is starting to be a mature application that, once released with KDE, will be its default instant messaging application. If you still have some doubts, look at the screenshots.