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Re: Need a sponsor for my konversation package



On Sunday 21 December 2003 04:15, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> What is it about konversation which makes it so much better than every
> other IRC client out there?

Well, I know there are more than a few IRC clients out there.  =)  And while 
it may be a stretch to claim it is "so much better than every other IRC 
client", it does have some fairly compelling features.  Here are my personal 
favorites, listed in a somewhat random order:

* System tray icon.  If you're not actively chatting you can close the main 
window but keep it running in your system tray and have quick access from all 
your virtual desktops.

* On-Screen-Display.  You can select various things that trigger an OSD text 
display above all your windows (like xmms-osd-plugin).  So if you have it 
running in the background and someone says something to you, you will notice 
it, and can usually read it and decide if it requires a response.  This is 
quite handy, and I don't find it to be at all intrusive.

* Spiffy tab-completion of nicks.  The latest CVS version lets you have a nice 
drop-down menu of nicknames when you hit tab.  This works like the usual 
nick-completion in xchat and others, but the dropdown menu makes it clearer 
what your choices are, and looks more polished.

* KDE integration.  This may not be much of a feature for you unless you use 
KDE as your DE, but it honors your KDE settings (style, fonts, colors, etc.),  
uses DCOP, behaves consistently with other apps, etc.

* Nice codebase and responsive upstream.  The upstream devels have been very 
receptive to patches thus far, and are often quick to implement feature 
requests.  This, combined with the fact that the KDE/Qt-based code is easy to 
read and patch, means that any missing features will not stay missing for 
long.

Now, to be honest, it may be a little early to upload this to Debian; it is 
still in beta, after all.  But I expect the list of compelling features to 
grow rapidly as Konversation matures.

If you are interested, I suggest installing the latest CVS build; I find it to 
be quite stable (it's never crashed on me) and a number of features have been 
added since 0.13.

Cheers,
nate

-- 
Nathaniel W. Turner
http://www.houseofnate.net/
Packages: http://debian.houseofnate.net/
Tel: +1 508 579 1948 (mobile)



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