Armin's personal Blog

We have released libinfinity 0.4.0 and Gobby 0.4.93, the latest version of our collaborative text editor. If you ask me, the killer feature in this release is with the user list - see for yourself:

Before: After:

However, there have been other major changes as well, including:

• Chat: The chat known from the stable Gobby 0.4.x series has been reintroduced. It now also features a backlog.
• HTML Export: Documents can be exported to HTML, keeping both user colors and syntax highlighting.
• Color Reset: User Colors in a document can be reset via Shift+Ctrl+C, or via the menu. This allows to get an overview of most recent changes when you want the user colors to be an indicator of activity, rather than of history. Colors are reset locally on the client-side only.
• Password Protection: infinoted 0.4.0, the dedicated server, allows to set a simple global password for the server. More sophisticated authentication mechanisms are planned for the next release, libinfinity 0.5 and Gobby 0.4.94.
• UI Enhancements: The user interface is nicer at many points: The browser list is now sorted alphabetically, the file chooser allows to open multiple files at once, the direct connection entry has a history to easily connect to hosts to which one connected before already, on a failed connection one can easily retry the connection via double clicking the host in the browser list, user colors adapt to the background color of the text view (read: text is readable with dark themes) and several more enhancements and bug fixes.

The very rough plan for the future is to add authentication support in 0.4.94, and displaying carets and selections of remote users (all protocol code is already there, all that is left to do is to draw them into the TextView) and self-hosting for 0.4.95 and 0.4.96.

The downside of this release is that it breaks compatibility with earlier releases, especially libinfinity 0.3.0/Gobby 0.4.92. I am sorry; I know this is annoying, but maintaining backwards compatibility is as well, and my excuse is that Gobby 0.4.9x is still experimental. It allows me to concentrate more on the interesting stuff. However, if it is not too much trouble then I will try to keep compatibility for the next release. For Windows users it should be very easy to upgrade since an all-in-one installer is provided. Philipp Kern promised to get it soon into Debian and Ubuntu, so I hope the compatibility break will not cause too much trouble. Our public server on gobby.0x539.de runs 0.4.0 already. None of us is using Mac OS X (anymore), so we can't provide binaries for it, unfortunately. If anyone creates a nice bundle, we would be happy to distribute it on our website.

I also want to express my thanks to Gabríel A. Pétursson and Benjamin Herr who made significant contributions to this release. Beginning from January, Benjamin Herr will be paid by the KIT's department of computer science to implement SVN integration and LDAP authentication, so these are likely to be available in one of the future releases as well.

In a related note, we have also launched http://infinote.org, a Wiki to host information on the infinote protocol used by Gobby via libinfinity's implementation. I plan to migrate our protocol site to it, and to add more detailed and more structured documentation there. Also, Kobby, Gobby's KDE counterpart, has had another release recently. It still uses libinfinity 0.3.0, but I expect that to change rather soon. Simon Veith has implemented the adOPTed algorithm and the transformation functions as used by infinote in Javascript, in the scope of the jinfinote project. It passes all of libinfinity's tests, and he is now working on a web-based editor which can talk to Gobby and Kobby. An experimental demo is available already, however it does not interfere with Gobby yet.

In another related note, the Gobby IRC channel moved to #infinote on freenode.org a few weeks ago. Actually we wanted #gobby which was already registered earlier though, however #gobby was registered earlier already even though it is unused nowadays. We try to get through the FreeNode bureaucracy to get the channel dropped, but it seems that this may take several months, if not years.