There has been a slight shift in the roadmap of Psi. While the only goal of 0.11 was to port it to Qt4 (do i hear a booooring somewhere?), we decided to make 0.11 also fully XMPP-compliant. We therefore merged the current ’next generation’ branch (which amongst others supports privacy lists) with the mainline development branch. A consequence of this is that other features were pulled into mainline as well (yay!), so it’s not unacceptable to start looking forward to the next release.

Lately, I have been searching for ways to trigger loops and samples from behind my drum kit. After playing around with a less than ideal setup involving many cables and devices (see below), I decided to buy myself a Roland SPD-S sampling pad. Turned out to be a pretty good move !

A few weeks ago, Tom Germeau from MozChat brought to my attention that recent clients such as Google Talk, Gajim, Pandion (and of course MozChat) are all using JEP-0085 (Chat State Notifications) for doing ‘Contact is typing …’ notifications. There have been many discussions in the past on whether or not to prefer this JEP over the old JEP-0022 (Message Events), which most of the other clients out there implement. This is why Psi didn’t implement chat sates yet. However, we recently decided to put this (cleaner, standards track) JEP into our mainline development version after all.

Magnus Henoch announced a few days ago that he was working on an ejabberd implementation for JEP-163 (Personal Eventing Protocol), the protocol formerly known as SPPS. I found a bit of spare time today to finish the real (as opposed to pseudo-) PEP implementation in Psi, while Magnus fixed some things on the server side. The implementation isn’t available publically yet (since no server supports it anyway), but interested server developers are of course always welcome to ask for a snapshot.

We’re currently working on putting JEP-0163: Simplified Personal Publish-Subscribe into Psi. A result of this work, together with an implementation of User Tune as our use case, can be seen in action here.

TuneController is a modular plugin-based Qt interface for talking to media players such as iTunes, XMMS, and WinAmp. The provided functionality is currently limited to notifying of player state and song changes, but other features (such as remote controlling, queueing, …) will be added in the future.

Support for JEP-115 (Entity Capabilities) has just hit the Psi mainline development branch. This doesn’t mean much to the user, except that it can display the client version of contacts without the burst of client-version queries each time you connect. However, there is still the overhead of the extra tag in every presence packet sent and received, but stream compression (either through TLS or using JEP-138) should take care of this in the future. JEP-115 also describes a server optimization to reduce traffic, but as far as we know, no server implements this. We hope that if more clients start supporting entity capabilities, the servers will follow as well.