Robotic Tendencies
The personal blog of Robert McQueen

April 19, 2006

Summer of Telepathy

I put a few ideas on the wiki page for some Summer of Code projects based on getting the Telepathy Framework used on the GNOME desktop. We’ve hacked out a spec for doing most IM & VOIP stuff via D-Bus so that you can add whatever functionality you want into any program like Nautilus, Evolution, Gossip, etc, and share the use of your server connections from wherever in the desktop makes the most sense. We’ve been working hard on our flagship XMPP backend implementation, telepathy-gabble, and Raphaël Slinckx & Adam Lofts have been working on some UI implementations in Python and C#, but we need to get some more people looking at different backends and integrating frontend functionality into the desktop. Get those SoC applications going if you think this sounds cool… 🙂

As well as my ideas, I should also mention I’d be happy to mentor for other deserving ideas such as eikke’s CDIS plans, and I’ve also got some ideas about how cross-program (and cross desktop) music databases should be achieved. I’m particularly keen on helping people with D-Bus related projects because I know that not enough people understand how all this stuff works, so I think it’s worth spending a bit of my time to spread the love (and pain) which I’ve learnt working on Telepathy.

posted by ramcq @ 12:00 pm
Comments (5) .:. Trackback .:. Permalink

5 responses to “Summer of Telepathy”

  1. John Goerzen says:

    Sounds nifty, but the name threw my off… telepathy is usually the stuff of scifi shows, meaning “mind reading.” I think you may have meant telephony.

    However, I must say that a telepathy framework would be quite sweet 😉

  2. Mikael Nilsson says:

    Great and interesting idea.

    It struck me some time ago that one major advantage that the open-source desktop has is that it can create standards for desktop interaction (DBUS and friends) and implement them in many apps that *interoperate* rather than compete.

    That way, we’ll eventually build interaction that surpasses anything available on proprietary desktops by far. This simple because the proprietary desktop does not foster cooperation…

    So keep up the good work!

  3. Where can I find a simple comparison of Sofia-SIP (used by Telepathy, I believe) to Ekiga’s OPAL library?

  4. Kai Vehmanen says:

    Murray,

    there’s no comprehensive comparison of Sofia-SIP vs OPAL, but take a look at:
    http://www.huisetalage.nl/sip/stacks.pdf
    Also, see http://sofia-sip.sourceforge.net/refdocs/sofia_sip_conformance.html for a overview of what Sofia-SIP supports.

    And note, Telepathy framework does not really depend on Sofia-SIP, or any other SIP stack, but there is a Telepathy connection manager for SIP under development which uses Sofia-SIP. You could of course write another SIP connection manager using OPAL.

  5. claire says:

    How does this Telepathy benefit to a project that tries to add a peer-to-peer voip client to an embedded device (maybe embedded linux based)? Thanks. What’s the minimum HW requirement for Telephay? Thanks.

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