Gof's weblog Blog de Olivier Goffart

Long time ago (end of 2006) I developed a patch to use your webcam with the Kopete Jabber plugin. I used the MSN webcam code 'as it' and wrapped it into XMPP XML. ^[1]

Here is the patch against Kopete 0.12 (in KDE 3.5) for those who want it: http://bepointbe.be/files/jabber_webcam.diff

Anyway, it has several negative issue

• This is not a XMPP standard, so it only work with person who have applied the same patch.
• It would be difficult for other client to include it (It was easy in Kopete because Kopete has an MSN implementation).
• Because of that I do not plan to include it in any official release.
• It doesn't use jingle, this is totally unrelated.

The only positive issue of this protocol is that it would be easy to implement it in the MSN gateway. But this has no real interest since only Kopete support it, and Kopete support MSN natively

It could also make happy linuxers that want to use their webcam without using the evil MSN. But they could also use other free conferencing software such as Ekiga.

KDE4 is a good time to think more about Instant messaging integration into the Desktop. I'm writing this blog entry to help me and others to understand our needs and how we should proceed.

The desktop integration consits of several level:

• In the Address Book : It helps to manage instant messaging information with others personal info. and eventually allow to start a chat or know the online status in real time from the address book interface
• In the Mail client : It consist of showing the online status of the contact we viewing a mail, and add the possibility to reply with an instant message instead of by mail.
• In the File manager : It is the possibility to send a file to a contact easily from the file manager.
• Much others: Now Listening, Web Authentication, Playing games, Voice and video, ...

The first three case are those that interest me in this post. I'll explain how they are done in KDE3, and after I'll see some others approach

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