Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Empathy is now in Karmic

As of today, the seeds have been switched, and Empathy, the awesome Telepathy IM client withsupport for both audio and video chat, geolocation, Adium themes, and collaboration via Tubes, is now included in the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala daily LiveCDs. Let's get testing!

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala current LiveCD running in Sun VirtualBox with Empathy open

10 comments:

Frank Groeneveld said...

And the people that live in countries where MSN is the most used IM network (for example The Netherlands) are downgraded...

Anonymous said...

If they are able to use MSN, the will be able to apt-get pidgin...

Anonymous said...

i'm fine with empathy as default, but please replace those ugly icons with those coming with pidgin.

rbj said...

"Ubuntu 9.04 Karmic Koala current LiveCD"?

FelipeC said...

Telepathy has support for MSN with both telepathy-butterfly and telepathy-haze. And there's another one coming: telepathy-msn-pecan.

Anonymous said...

This is such an awful, awful idea.

If they remove this and the 'Encrypt' feature in Nautilus, I'm leaving for Debian.

ओंकार (Onkar) said...

@Frank,
telepathy-butterfly supports MSN, but the code is not well maintained.
Instead Karmic will probably have telepathy-haze installed by default which is wrapper over libpurple (the pidgin core library). So you will be able to use all the protocols that pidgin supports.

@Danny,
AFAIK, empathy in karmic does not include support for geolocation and UPnP yet because the libraries needed are in universe. Please verify.

Anonymous said...

Telepathy does not support MSN other than the most basic chat parts, and hardly even that. It's a joke, I can't use this at work. I would be all for the switch if there actually was people working on fixing it, but they are all doing weirdo tubes-and-avahi stuff instead.

There just is no sense of users and usability in this project.

Anonymous said...

All protocols can be supperted which is supported by pidgin with telepathy-haze? Not only MSN? For example I'm using facebook chat with pidgin just too much, so I can't live without that with another IM solution, but if telepathy can support that in this way too, it's a very good news for me then :) Another thing: maybe I was wrong (or I've tested too old version of telepathy some months ago), but the most annoying thing in telepathy for me, that I can't group the same contacts (with multiple protocols) into one, without that I will have about hundred contact entries in the contact list, which is quite annoying. I would like to use the concept "one entry for one person even if he/she has dozen of different protocols".

Anonymous said...

I gave this a try for the past few days on the Alpha 3 of Karmic, and the user experience (especially for those with multiple accounts) is just awful. Telepathy may be a great framework, but as far as Empathy goes, it's just not a good client from a usability/clarity standpoint. A long and detailed look at usability issues in Empathy (and Pidgin) that someone else took the time to do can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EmpathyVsPidginUsability

Account setup and status-setting are my two largest complaints. Pidgin should not be replaced by default just yet, as new users who encounter these issues will have a bad experience, and not necessarily know that things like pidgin and ekiga exist (existing users can just dl and install the app of their choice, so it's not such a big deal there).

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