Kaidan 0.10.0: Too Much to Summarize!

Monday, 9 December 2024 | Kaidan News

We finally made it: Kaidan’s next release with so many features that we cannot summarize them in one sentence!

Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Assure and NGI Zero Entrust with public money provided by the European Commission. If you want Kaidan’s progress to continue and keep more free software projects alive, please share and sign the open letter for further funding!

Now to the bunch of Kaidan’s new and great features:

Group chats with invitations, user listing, participant mentioning and private/public group chat filtering are supported now. In order to use it, you need an XMPP provider that supports MIX-Core, MIX-PAM and MIX-Admin. Unfortunately, there are not many providers supporting it yet since it is a comparatively recent group chat variant.

You do not need to quote messages just to reply to them any longer. The messages are referenced internally without bloating the conversation. After clicking on a referenced message, Kaidan even jumps to it. In addition, Kaidan allows you to remove unwanted messages locally.

We added an overview of all shared media to quickly find the image you received some time ago. You can define when to download media automatically. Furthermore, connecting to the server is now really fast - no need to wait multiple seconds just to see your latest offline messages anymore.

If you enter a chat address (e.g., to add a contact), its server part is now autocompleted if available. We added filter options for contacts and group chats. After adding labels to them, you can even search by those labels. And if you do not want to get any messages from someone, you can block them.

In case you need to move to a new account (e.g., if you are dissatisfied with your current XMPP provider), Kaidan helps you with that. For example, it transfers your contacts and informs them about the move. The redesigned onboarding user interface including many fixes assists with choosing a new provider and creating an account on it.

We updated Kaidan to the API v2 of XMPP Providers to stay up-to-date with the project’s data. If you are an operator of a public XMPP provider and would like Kaidan’s users to easily create accounts on it, simply ask to add it to the provider list.

The complete list of changes can be found in the changelog section. There is also a technical overview of all currently supported features.

Please note that we currently focus on new features instead of supporting more systems. Once Kaidan has a reasonable feature set, we will work on that topic again. Even if Kaidan is making good progress, keep in mind that it is not yet a stable app.

Changelog

Features:

Add server address completion (fazevedo)
Allow to edit account’s profile (jbb)
Store and display delivery states of message reactions (melvo)
Send pending message reactions after going online (melvo)
Enable user to resend a message reaction if it previously failed (melvo)
Open contact addition as page (mobile) or dialog (desktop) (melvo)
Add option to open chat if contact exists on adding contact (melvo)
Use consistent page with search bar for searching its content (melvo)
Add local message removal (taibsu)
Allow reacting to own messages (melvo)
Add login option to chat (melvo)
Display day of the week or “yesterday” for last messages (taibsu, melvo)
Add media overview (fazevedo, melvo)
Add contact list filtering by account and labels (i.e., roster groups) (incl. addition/removal) (melvo, tech-bash)
Add message date sections to chat (melvo)
Add support for automatic media downloads (fazevedo)
Add filtering contacts by availability (melvo)
Add item to contact list on first received direct message (melvo)
Add support for blocking chat addresses (lnj)
Improve notes chat (chat with oneself) usage (melvo)
Place avatar above chat address and name in account/contact details on narrow window (melvo)
Reload camera device for QR code scanning as soon as it is plugged in / enabled (melvo)
Provide slider for QR code scanning to adjust camera zoom (melvo)
Add contact to contact list on receiving presence subscription request (melvo)
Add encryption key authentication via entering key IDs (melvo)
Improve connecting to server and authentication (XEP-0388: Extensible SASL Profile (SASL 2), XEP-0386: Bind 2, XEP-0484: Fast Authentication Streamlining Tokens, XEP-0368: SRV records for XMPP over TLS) (lnj)
Support media sharing with more clients even for sharing multiple files at once (XEP-0447: Stateless file sharing v0.3) (lnj)
Display and check media upload size limit (fazevedo)
Redesign message input field to use rounded corners and resized/symbolic buttons (melvo)
Add support for moving account data to another account, informing contacts and restoring settings for moved contacts (XEP-0283: Moved) (fazevedo)
Add group chat support with invitations, user listing, participant mentioning and private/public group chat filtering (XEP-0369: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX), XEP-0405: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): Participant Server Requirements, XEP-0406: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): MIX Administration, XEP-0407: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): Miscellaneous Capabilities) (melvo)
Add button to cancel message correction (melvo)
Display marker for new messages (melvo)
Add enhanced account-wide and per contact notification settings depending on group chat mentions and presence (melvo)
Focus input fields appropriately (melvo)
Add support for replying to messages (XEP-0461: Message Replies) (melvo)
Indicate that Kaidan is busy during account deletion and group chat actions (melvo)
Hide account deletion button if In-Band Registration is not supported (melvo)
Embed login area in page for QR code scanning and page for web registration instead of opening start page (melvo)
Redesign onboarding user interface including new page for choosing provider to create account on (melvo)
Handle various corner cases that can occur during account creation (melvo)
Update to XMPP Providers v2 (melvo)
Hide voice message button if uploading is not supported (melvo)
Replace custom images for message delivery states with regular theme icons (melvo)
Free up message content space by hiding unneeded avatars and increasing maximum message bubble width (melvo)
Highlight draft message text to easily see what is not sent yet (melvo)
Store sent media in suitable directories with appropriate file extensions (melvo)
Allow sending media with less steps from recording to sending (melvo)
Add media to be sent in scrollable area above message input field (melvo)
Display original images (if available) as previews instead of their thumbnails (melvo)
Display high resolution thumbnails for locally stored videos as previews instead of their thumbnails (melvo)
Send smaller thumbnails (melvo)
Show camera status and reload camera once plugged in for taking pictures or recording videos (melvo)
Add zoom slider for taking pictures or recording videos (melvo)
Show overlay with description when files are dragged to be dropped on chats for being shared (melvo)
Show location previews on a map (melvo)
Open locations in user-defined way (system default, in-app, web) (melvo)
Delete media that is only captured for sending but not sent (melvo)
Add voice message recorder to message input field (melvo)
Add inline audio player (melvo)
Add context menu entry for opening directory of media files (melvo)
Show collapsible buttons to send media/locations inside of message input field (melvo)
Move button for adding hidden message part to new collapsible button area (melvo)

Bugfixes:

Fix index out of range error in message search (taibsu)
Fix updating last message information in contact list (melvo)
Fix multiple corrections of the same message (melvo, taibsu)
Request delivery receipts for pending messages (melvo)
Fix sorting roster items (melvo)
Fix displaying spoiler messages (melvo)
Fix displaying errors and encryption warnings for messages (melvo)
Fix fetching messages from server’s archive (melvo)
Fix various encryption problems (melvo)
Send delivery receipts for catched up messages (melvo)
Do not hide last message date if contact name is too long (melvo)
Fix displaying emojis (melvo)
Fix several OMEMO bugs (melvo)
Remove all locally stored data related to removed accounts (melvo)
Fix displaying media preview file names/sizes (melvo)
Fix disconnecting from server when application window is closed including timeout on connection problems (melvo)
Fix media/location sharing (melvo)
Fix handling emoji message reactions (melvo)
Fix moving pinned chats (fazevedo)
Fix drag and drop for files and pasting them (melvo)
Fix sending/displaying media in selected order (lnj, melvo)

Notes:

Kaidan is REUSE-compliant now
Kaidan requires Qt 5.15 and QXmpp 1.9 now

Download

Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution: