KouChat

Serverless LAN Chat

KouChat icon

KouChat v1.0.0 is out!

It’s finally here :D

The great one point zero! This is a big milestone for me. This means I finally finished what I started. I usually think of 1.0 as the first non-beta release of a piece of software. Full of shortcuts, half-baked features, and bugs. Just to get something out as soon as possible. For some strange reason, that wasn’t the way KouChat was developed. I don’t even remember when it all started, but it was obviously before the release of 0.5.1 in early 2006 at SourceForge. Maybe six months earlier. Or more. Time flies when you’re having fun :)

So, finished you ask? Well, not entirely finished, but I’ll come back to that some other day. What I meant was that my initial goals for 1.0 had been reached. And then some! I speculated in calling my first public release 1.0, but thought that KouChat needed a couple of more features and a bit more testing first. Then I got bored with Java and started porting KouChat to C++. And I got bored with C++ and ported the improvements back into the Java version. This was all in a time when KouChat was entirely in Norwegian. The code and the user interface.

For 0.6.0 I translated everything to English. After getting 0.6.1 out the door I felt so close to being done that I jumped straight to 0.9.0. That was in 2007! My plan for the 0.9 series was things like private chat, message logging, console mode, UTF-8 support and sounds. Most of which was done a long time ago. Except I never completed the console mode. What was missing was file transfer. I kind of hit a wall there. Didn’t know how to do it, so I kept avoiding it, and came up with other features or fixes to do. And I got suggestions from others, so there was always something else to do.

But it came to a point where enough is enough! I had to finish this. And that was the main focus of this release. And putting some finishing touches on things.

OK, enough babbling, here is a short summary of the most important changes:

  • Fixed a bug when canceling an ongoing file transfer
  • Fixed a concurrency bug in classes for sending and receiving messages
  • Changed to using the user name from the operating system as the default nick name if no settings are found
  • Added a new dialog window for showing unexpected errors to the user
  • Added missing commands for file transfer in console mode
  • Added --debug startup option to activate all logging
  • Added tips & tricks from the wiki to the help menu
  • And some fixes and improvements here and there

Have fun, and don’t forget to submit those feature requests and bug reports in the issue tracker :)