KMess 1.5 released!

[Diederik van der Boor]

Hi everyone,

The KMess development team is very pleased to announce version 1.5 of KMess, a 
MSN Messenger client for KDE!

After a long time of development from version 1.4 first, and the 1.5-pre 
series after, we've been able to obtain a very stable and feature-filled 
version. This will also mark a great moment: KMess 1.5 will be the last 
version based on Qt 3 and KDE 3. The next major version will be based on Qt 
4 / KDE 4, and we expect more exciting improvements in the near future.

== About KMess ==
KMess is an alternative MSN Messenger chat client for Linux. It allows Linux 
users to chat with friends who use MSN Messenger in Windows or Mac OS. The 
strength of KMess is it's integration with the KDE desktop environment, focus 
on MSN Messenger specific features and an easy-to-use interface.

== Changes ==
Users of KMess 1.5-pre2 will might notice that file transfers have become 
stable while operating full-speed. The chat windows received some final love 
and the notification ballons got a total make over to make use of native KDE 
popups. We also added the ability to send custom emoticons, and added the 
necessary improvements to make it stable, polished and worth releasing.

Users of the last official stable release (1.4.3) will notice the quite some 
new interesting features. Most parts of the user interface have been 
improved. Combined with rich colorful chat styles it's a refreshing breeze 
for the eyes.

This release brings the MSN support to a level we're happy with.
During the development of KMess 1.5-pre1 and pre2, we've added support for the 
things you'd expect from a MSN Messenger client. That's nudges, now playing 
information, custom emoticons, personal messages, fast file transfers and 
automatic download of display pictures. To make sure you don't miss something 
in a conversation, Winks and offline messages can also be received, being 
able to send those as well is still a todo.

== License ==
KMess is released under the GPL version 2.

== More information about KMess ==
homepage: http://www.kmess.org/
screenshots: http://www.kmess.org/screenshots/
downloads: http://www.kmess.org/download/
changelog: http://www.kmess.org/changes/1.5/

== Final words ==
It has been quite a while since we've released an official stable version, and 
we'd love to speed things up a little in the future.

New developers are invited to check out http://trac.kmess.org/! This site 
gives you more inside information about what we're doing, and also provides 
tutorials to help with translations, chat styles or code development as well.

For now, enjoy this release! We're excited about it, and hope you'll be as 
well. Feedback, patches or suggestions are welcome.

Regards, 

The KMess team.