Finally, a pymsn release

Hello everyone,

The Pymsn developers are happy to introduce you to Pymsn 0.3, the brand new version of the python MSN protocol free implementation. This release is the result of about one year of unsteady development, during which Pymsn was completely rewritten to support the latest version of the protocol: MSNP15.

We are proud to announce that we reached our goal, and you can grab the tarballs from here: http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/releases/pymsn/

Features brought to you by this release are :

- Best MSNP2P implementation : avatars and custom emoticons
- Yahoo messenger contacts support : chat and presence
- Live Address Book support : full contact and group management
- Server side contacts aliasing
- Offline messages support
- MSN Spaces
- Content Roaming support : avatar, display name and personal message storage
- Full support for HTTP and HTTPS proxies
- Support HTTP Polling transport
- No threads, fully asynchronous
- Caching system

We would like to thank everyone who helped to make this release happen.

The new telepathy-butterfly is out as well : http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/releases/telepathy-butterfly/

pymsn, butterfly and empathy

This weekend, Ali got his msnp2p stack polished so we could work on some p2p integration in pymsn. This led display pictures (aka avatars) to land into the library. That means we are really close to release the new version of pymsn on which we’re working for several months now.

Today, as we were implementing display pictures in pymsn, I wrote the telepathy-butterfly (the MSN connection manager for Telepathy based on pymsn) part for avatars, which was a good opportunity to test the new feature. This closes the list of features to implement into butterfly before a release as well, since I got groups and aliasing (you can nickname your buddies) working in the past days. Contact handles format was changed to support Yahoo contacts in butterfly (as pymsn, covering MSNP15, allows it).I’ve tried to integrate the pymsn offline messages feature into butterfly but I wasn’t pleased with it so it’s sleeping in a separate branch for now. However, I’d like to get full membership groups management too to be able to add/remove contacts, block them, etc.

The next screenshot shows empathy displaying my personal MSN account using telepathy-butterfly. I’m really glad that we are finally getting concrete things to show

Activity around the pymsn project

I begin to hear about some projects using our beloved python MSN Messenger library : pymsn. As you could have guessed, most of them are clients.  There is CupsAndString, a command line client written in 128 lines of python by Alsuren, LiMSN which has a wxWidgets interface and finally Open Live Messenger, a GTK+ client written by Julien Enche (Trapamoosch). Thanks to all of the client developers for your feedbacks and for providing examples of how to use the library .

Of course, pymsn is also the base library for the telepathy-butterfly Telepathy connection manager. There is a development version of butterfly but most of the pymsn new/refreshed features will be integrated in it just before the release because it’s not a weighty work to do and all development efforts should better go for pymsn.

If any reader of this post is interested in learning more on the pymsn project, feel free to join #pymsn on freenode to have a good chat. Contributors of all sorts (developers, testers, documentation writers, …) are welcome too