Luis Mariano Guerra of the Emesene development team has issued a call for people to begin testing the successor to popular MSN-based messaging application Emesene.
Calling for a push to get the software up to beta quality, Luis wants to move ‘users and developers to Emesne 2’ fearing that if such a transition doesn’t happen soon “..both emesene 1 and 2 will stall and go the way of the dodo.”
In his own words: “a forever alpha doesn’t help nobody.”
Features of Emesene 2
Emesene 2 certainly has some stellar features either baked, part-baked on at least pre-mixed and ready to bake.
From Messaging Menu and Indicator-Applet integration to support for other chat protocols including Facebook and Google GTalk. Customization, themeing and UI tweaks familiar to users of current-spec Emesene are ready – albeit in an unrefined form – and were it not for some major bugs concerning the actual chat aspect of Emesene 2 I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to those with a taste for the bleeding edge .
Sadly during my short play with it earlier this evening I spent more time talking to myself out of frustration than to any of my contacts online. The interface would freeze, stall then crash anytime someone tried to send an IM.
Annoying, sure, but evidence of why the other-wise great app needs people on it finding bugs, reporting bugs, fixing bugs.
Emesene 2 PPA
Emesene 2 does have a testing PPA although it is only updated weekly and hasn’t been updated to the latest testing version at the time of writing.
Installing Emesene 2 from this PPA will uninstall/replace any existing Emesene installation.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bjfs/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install emesene2
For the latest slam-up-to-date development version, or to report bugs, you can find Emesene 2 on GitHub.