Software Update: Pidgin 2.4.0

Pidgin 2.4.0 saw the light of day on Friday. Pidgin, formerly known as Gaim, can work with the networks of AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell Groupwise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, Simple and Zephyr. The software is open source and is released under version 2 of the GPL license. The changelog for this release shows the following changes:

libpurple

• Added support for offline messages for AIM accounts (thanks to Matthew Goldstein)
• Fixed various problems with loss of status messages when going or returning from idle on MySpaceIM.
• Eliminated unmaintained Howl backend implementation for the Bonjour protocol. Avahi (or Apple’s Bonjour runtime on win32) is now required to use Bonjour.
• Partial support for viewing ICQ status notes (Collin from ComBOTS GmbH).
• Support for /notice on IRC.
• Support for Yahoo! Messenger 7.0+ file transfer method (Thanumalayan S.)
• Support for retrieving full names and addresses from the address book on Yahoo! Japan (Yusuke Odate)
• The AIM/ICQ server-side preference for “allow others to see me as idle” is no longer unconditionally set to “yes” even when your libpurple preference is “no.”
• Fix SSL certificate checks for renewed certificates
• Fix the ability to set vCard buddy icons on Google Talk/XMPP
• D-Bus fixes on 64 bit
• Fixed retrieval of buddy icons and setting of server-side aliases on Yahoo! and Yahoo! Japan when using an HTTP proxy server (Gideon N. Guillen)
• Fixed an MSN bug that would leave you appearing offline when transferred to different server

Pidgin

• Added the ability to theme conversation name colors (red and blue) through your GTK+ theme, and exposed those theme settings to the Pidgin GTK+ Theme Control plugin (Dustin Howett)
• Fixed having multiple alias edit areas in the infopane (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Save the conversation “Enable Logging” option per contact (Moos Heintzen)
• Typing notifications are now shown in the conversation area

Finch

• Color is used in the buddy list to indicate status, and the conversation window to indicate various message attributes. Look at the sample gntrc file in the man page for details.
• The default keybinding for dump-screen is now MD and uses a file request dialog. Md will properly delete-forward-word, and Mf has been fixed to imitate readline’s behavior.
• New bindings alt+tab and alt+shift+tab to help navigating between the higlighted windows (details on the man page).
• Recently signed on (or off) buddies blink in the buddy list.
• New action ‘Room List’ in the action list can be used to get the list of available chat rooms for an online account.
• The ‘Grouping’ plugin can be used for alternate grouping in the buddy list. The current options are ‘Group Online/Offline’ and ‘No Group’.
• Added a log viewer
• Added the ability to block/unblock buddies – see the buddy context menu and the menu for the buddy list.
• Fixed a bug preventing finch working on x86_64

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