Many people are still considering GnomeMeeting as an Instant Messenger and do not understand the difference between Instant Messengers having a few VoIP capabilities and pure VoIP applications. I have reacted to this in my blog and tried to explain what GnomeMeeting is and what it is not. I hope some of you will find it useful and I also hope it will help understanding why full-featured VoIP applications are important and why Instant Messengers with voice capabilities are not enough.

The plugins system was finished today, ie the day of my birthday. You can expect CVS binary packages to appear soon. That will be a good way to test and report bugs, and thus contribute to the 1.00 release.

I haven't posted any news here since a long time because I have maintained my blog with mainly GnomeMeeting news. A lot happened to me in the last few weeks, I'm currently working for IT Optics, a Belgian Open Source consulting company.

GnomeMeeting 0.98.5 is available for download at the usual location. It is a very minor bugfix release, but it is finally the release included in GNOME 2.4.
Here is the list of changes :

• Fixed possible crash when registering to ILS. That possible crash should also be fixed by upgrading to libxml2 2.5.11.

GnomeMeeting 0.98.4 is available for download at the usual location. It is a minor bugfixes release, but it is still worth an upgrade. Notice that GnomeMeeting 0.98.4 is the release of GnomeMeeting that will be shipped with GNOME 2.4 next week.
Here is the list of changes :

• Better HIG compliance for the GUI
• Fixed possible crash at startup
• Fixed possible crash when registering to ILS
• Fixed possible loop when trying to refresh the list of users on a broken ILS server

FAQ

The FAQ has been updated.The firewall rules for OpenBSD 3.3 have been updated thanks to Joey Lamonthe.
GnomeMeeting development

We are also working hard on the future 1.00 release. If you have suggestions, bug reports, or want to help, please contact us. We are building daily packages of the CVS version so that you can easily test. If you want to help, testing is a very good way of doing it.
My blog

There was a power outage at the provider where seconix.com is hosted and the server didn't restart. The ILS directory was thus unavailable during 2 days, it is now back and we encourage you to make use of it.
The ILS directory provides you with a callto address, comparable to an e-mail address, that permits you to always be callable by your friends without the need to know your IP address. Notice that the service is completely free.

I'm back from holidays and work will start again on GnomeMeeting, our main goal will now be to clean and fix the small details required to have a rock-solid and easy to use 1.00 release. Please contribute back by reporting bugs. If you are ready to help the project, notice that there are also a few tasks that do not require coding abilities. Thanks for your support to all!

I'll be on holidays for 3 weeks this sunday, it means that I will be unable to answer mails, bug reports, and fix ILS problems (if any) before the beginning of August. However, there are many helpful people who will do their best to help you if needed.
Thanks for your patience.

GnomeMeeting is 2 years old today! The first public version of GnomeMeeting was released just 2 years ago. You can see screenshots here and see the progress that has been made since the first release. Notice that I had started coding on GnomeMeeting in december 2001, so the project is a bit older than its official release.
Today is also the birthday of Jonita who you can see in the screenshots page.