So a couple days ago, I had a nice surprise in my mailbox:

Sent by jussi01 all the way from Finland to Germany, as a huge Thank You for the development team :) Needless to say that, while it might not increase productivity at our next devmeeting, it surely increases the dev team's motivation to continue to make Quassel rock!

Thanks a bunch jussi01, and we're looking forward to crack that bottle open for reaching the Ballmer Peak soonish :)

On an unrelated note, the Quassel team will be present at the Qt Developer Days in Munich next week, so if you happen to attend those, be sure to have a chat with us :)

Quassel on KDE4 with a dark theme. Thanks to jussi01 for the screenshot :)

After quite a long while, we finally present to you a new shiny Quassel IRC release! It so happened that we decided to call it 0.3.0.1, which, as attentive readers will certainly notice in an instant, is not the long-expected 0.2.0 (and not even 0.3.0, for that matter). So, uhm, what's up with those Quassel developers and their versioning scheme?

As some of you know, we have been working on a rewrite of the old ChatWidget for quite some time now, and it was always planned that this rewrite would end up as a 0.3 release, whereas the old ChatWidget would live in 0.2. It turned out that we would not only rewrite the ChatWidget (which is now called ChatView), but also most of the client-side message handling. We have switched to a Model-View-Controller-based architecture now. Other than being much easier to maintain and improve on, this approach also allows maximum resource sharing (for example, a chatline is now only stored once, no matter how many ChatViews display it). This results in a Quassel Client that needs much less RAM than versions from the 0.2 branch. Also, we have been (and still are) working on making things more efficient both time- and space-wise, and the current 0.3.0.1 client is already much leaner and meaner than 0.2.0-rc1.

In addition to that architectural rewrite and the optimizations, with the new ChatView and its new and improved code base we could finally start adding new features and improvements to your chat window. So you'll notice a bunch of new stuff, like visible column handles, a last-seen remember line, in-buffer search and more. I won't give you a comprehensive list of new features this time, since it's just too much - just check it out for yourself!

Just to give you a heads-up: With the release of 0.2.0 (which we expect during the next few weeks) we'll switch to a versioning scheme that is more consistent to other projects. This means that from then on, we will be releasing new patch-level releases rather than going the alpha/beta/rc cycle. The latter made sense as long as we didn't have a version that we considered complete enough to be a real release. Based on user feedback and our own experience, we feel quite confident about releasing 0.2.0 very soon now.

After being on a bugfixing spree the past couple of weeks, the Quassel Team proudly gives you our first-ever Release Candidate of what shall become quassel-0.2.0. Since the 0.2 branch has been in feature freeze for a while, you probably won't find much new stuff (except for the occasional feature that might have crept in completely unnoticed of course ;-)), but on the other hand you will also find less bugs than in the previous releases, so grab it while it's still steaming!

Quassel supports SSL encryption for the connection between clients and core. In order to support this, a Quassel Core needs a PEM certificate. This needs to be named "quasselCert.pem" and stored in Quassel's configdir. In Linux, it's ~/.config/quassel-irc.org/; on Mac, you'll have to put it in ~/Library/Application Support/Quassel/, and on Windows it's in %appdata%\[roaming - only on Vista/Win7]\quassel-irc.org\. Note that the location can be changed using --configdir.

After all the hazzle that came with the switch from svn to git and qmake to cmake, I'm glad to tell you, that the nightly builds for Mac OS X are available again. Currently there are only Mac OS X nightlys for 0.2 but that is about to change soonish. Get them as usual at http://quassel-irc.org/nightly/macosx/

This is mainly due to the fact that the Qt's Sqlite interface uses UTF-16 to store strings in the database. The size should shrink to about half of the current size when other storage backends like postgre sql and mysql will be introduced.

Besides that, you can compress the database by rebuilding it. This requires the core to be shut down. Run the following commands:
sqlite3 ~/.quassel/quassel-storage.sqlite .dump | sqlite3 ~/.quassel/quassel-storage.sqlite.bak
mv ~/.quassel/quassel-storage.sqlite.bak ~/.quassel/quassel-storage.sqlite

Thanks to Flameeyes, we now have an official presence at the very cool "Social Network for Open Source Developers" called ohloh. If you are a Quassel user, don't hesitate to stop by and show the world :)

After our switch to Git as our version control system, we now also have changed our build system from qmake to CMake. Long-time Quassulans will know that we already had a CMake-based build system before switching to qmake in the first place :) Back then, we decided we'd need qmake to support Qtopia, plus CMake was quite clumsy at the time (and our old build system was uber-complex). Now, it has turned out that we can easily generate Qtopia build files from any build system, plus in the meantime our qmake stuff has grown much more complex than the old system ever was - and it came to the point where qmake just couldn't do all we needed it to do anymore.