Emesene 1.6 Released, What’s New?

Instant Messaging client ‘Emesene‘ slipped a new release out on Monday but what’s new in it?

Aside from bug fixes all round – which even the team themselves admit “we’re too lazy to write ’em all” – there are a few GUI changes that you’ll likely come across…

New Preferences Windows

We blogged about this back in early December where we were stoked to see better sorting of configuration options and loved the few new features that slipped in.

The “tabs” are now presented on the left-hand side (as opposed to the top in previous versions) making it more in line with out desktop applications’ preference windows. It also now displays much better on netbook screens, which are wider rather than taller.

New Features

Amongst the new-look menu’s you’re find some really great new features and improvements.

Conversation Style Previews

No longer just a drop-down box relying on you already knowing how they’d look; conversation style previews help you get the type of layout that you really want.

Easy Install Themes

Icon and emoticon themes can be installed with simplicity via the new ‘install new’ feature.

What Else is new?

“Nickname Roaming” comes to Emesene. “What is that?” you ask. It allows your nickname and personal message to be “saved” between sessions and used when you log to another MSN client (that supports it) on any other machine. It also means whatever you set your status as in those will be used when you login to Emesene again.

If you dual boot Windows and Ubuntu – you’ll soon see!

Sound is no-longer a plug-in but is part of Emesene’s “core”.

Install/Download

Oddly download links for 1.6 still aren’t up. If you can’t wait and want it already you can use the Emesene SVN PPA – which offers up a weekly snapshot of Emesene’s development version.

Add the PPA

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bjfs/ppa

If you already have Emesene installed follow that up with: –

• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

If you don’t have Emesene installed, use: –

• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install emesene

Source

If you don’t want to add the PPA but still want 1.6 you can download the source: –

• http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/emesene/emesene-1.6/emesene-1.6.tar.gz?

When downloaded, move it somewhere safe (your home folder, perhaps) and extract the contents.

In the extracted folder find the file called ‘emesene’ – JUST ‘emesene’ – nothing after it. Double click this and in the pop-up dialog choose “run”.