June 2006

One small note: D-BUS support is disabled by default, so that people who don’t use it and don’t needed are not affected by long startup times and so on and so on.

To bring it back in 1.2-compliant manner add the following switches to command line when starting Skype:

--enable-dbus --use-system-dbus

The reason for this is that Skype uses per-user session bus by default now, while old behavior was to use system-wide bus.

Sorry for the confusion.

After almost 9 months of development, rumours, frustration, hope, absence of hope, resurrection of hope and killing of hope again I’m somewhat happy to announce the arrival of Skype for Linux 1.3.0.30 beta!

Since it is a beta its main purpose is to collect a lot of feedback from you, folks. Come and get it here. I’ll briefly list major changes below, and feel free to tell me about anything that doesn’t work as expected, or even at all :)

ALSA

Well, you certainly know about this - this was the main reason for launching 1.3 and it became its main issue. It’s now pretty stable and therefore possible to show it to the world finally. You will find a selector to switch between ALSA and OSS in the Options menu, Sound Devices tab. Switching between ALSA and OSS might require a restart of Skype, switching call device in ALSA and OSS should be effective immediately (just don’t think it will work inside an active call — it will not).

Continue reading "Open Beta" »

…is ready. We’ll be doing some more tests and release an open beta after that. Stay tuned.

Funny thing I just got playing with improving translations is that yaml dump of original strings is just 1 byte smaller than original strings xml file, but it contains more useful information and loads a decent bit faster.

180873  skype_en.ts
180872  skype_en.yaml

(Yes, you got it, I’m doing it all with Ruby. What a joy!)

So all important things in the 1.3 queue are done now, only testing and fixing bugs left.

I’m sketching the refactor process for 1.4 — what I have to throw out, what to rewrite and what to keep. Porting to Qt4 is a major change because of MVC and cross-thread signals. The code will become much more lightweight as a result. A major speedup of chat code is planned as well, many intermediate steps will be removed.

For the 1.3 — don’t get all excited about it yet, but the open beta is close, very close.

I’ve put D-BUS 0.23 support back into latest Skype closed beta, seems to work for me.

Next step would be to put D-BUS 0.61+ support as well, since I was able to have all D-BUS support in a single Transport module it should be very easy to do.

It would be nice to add D-BUS transport support to demo Skype console as well.

I’m making a list of things to port for next release, so if you think something should be changed in Skype for Linux — say now ;)

Okay, now that I’ve ported the code, I need to downgrade my SuSE back to 0.23 somehow and it doesn’t quite look possible, given heavy dependency of HAL modules on recent D-BUS.

If I’m not back by monday this means I’ve ruined my SuSE into pieces ;)

I’ve successfully implemented X11 public API transport for Skype UI.

It is fast, reliable and in principle you can use it even across network.

I’ve also implemented a small demo application called Skype API console. It lets you interactively enter API commands, receive replies and control Skype UI. After some polishing I’m planning to release this console under open source license as an example of how X11 transport can be used with Skype API.

Continue reading "X11 success" »