Empathy maybe replacing Pidgin

[Mr. Picklesworth]

What a lot of people don't understand is that Empathy is meant to be simple. It's just one tiny component of the awesomely flexible Telepathy stack. If someone really wanted a ridiculously busy front-end with useless graphics, it could be built. However, the point of Telepathy is to make the entire desktop your instant messaging client. Anything can be a part of it, and hopefully in the future everything will be.

UI is vastly improving now over what's in the current stable builds, and conveniently the awesome libtelepathy-using applications will probably trickle in at the same time as the awesome MPX-using applications. Lots of neat stuff coming down the tubes. Please don't fight it or I will be very sad.

[Sand & Mercury]

It looks promising but I would rather wait until it's more mature before I consider using it.

[Johnsie]

You mean we might have video/audio over the major networks before 2015? Awesome!!

I still use Windows for multimedia communication and p2p TV. Skype for linux is ok but not very many people I know use skype. AMSN has very buggy video and no audio, pidgin is like going back to the 1990's because it is text only...

[Polygon]

pidgin is pretty simple (too simple if you ask a lot of users), empathy just looks bad. It uses the very ugly and unintuitive status icons (since when does a circle mean available? triangle for busy? square for invisible?) and you need to use libpurple if you need to use some types of accounts as they are not included or empathy/telepathy doesnt support them

and what use does empathy have for the MPX stuff? O.o

[kevdog]

Video for pidgin is in the works -- don't know the release dates just yet. Although pidgin doesn't release cvs sources, I know part of the code has made its way into the internal pidgin cvs tree (or whatever cvs versioning system they use -- svn, git, etc).

[jrusso2]

Video for pidgin is in the works -- don't know the release dates just yet. Although pidgin doesn't release cvs sources, I know part of the code has made its way into the internal pidgin cvs tree (or whatever cvs versioning system they use -- svn, git, etc).

I have been hearing that they were in the works since before it was called Pidgin. But the dev's don't seem interested in it.

Empathy is a client for the future. And its a lot easier to fix buttons
and icons then add video and voice.

[kevdog]

I have been hearing that they were in the works since before it was called Pidgin. But the dev's don't seem interested in it.

Your opinion seems to be a lot different than those voiced by the developers on #pidgin.

[jrusso2]

Well whats the date for the alpha?

[Polygon]

like most other projects: when its done.

still. i dont like the fact that empathy requires gnome. Make it independent of gnome, redo the interface, and have native support (no libpurple) for all the clients that pidgin supports, and then ill try it out =)

[kevdog]

Well whats the date for the alpha?

I wish I knew. As you know the developers are not that frank. Same old boring response -- when its done it will be released, however likely its several versions away.