Galago - Presence for the Linux Desktop

For those that feel that most Linux apps are still a few too many years behind that of what one might find on a Windows desktop, take a look at this. Named Galago and created for the Gnome desktop (sorry KDE users), this is much more than what you might find in a typical IM client, it is about establishing a real presence.

Galago uses D-BUS for communication. D-BUS is an excellent Inter-Process Communication library from Freedesktop. The two main components in Galago are libgalago, the standard library that projects will be working with, and galago-daemon, the D-BUS service daemon that provides the centralized management for presence. Since D-BUS is used, Galago can take advantage of D-BUS activation, so that galago-daemon is always launched when it’s needed. Users simply have to make sure that they have a working D-BUS session bus, and D-BUS takes care of the rest.

On top of those core components, there are other libraries and applications that users and developers may find useful.
libgalago-gtk provides a set of common GTK 2.x widgets for displaying presence information in the form of auto-updating service and presence icons, avatar icons, photo icons, service drop-down boxes, account drop-down boxes, menu items, and more. Once told to monitor an account, service, person, or presence, these widgets will listen in for any changes and update accordingly. This makes the developer’s life a lot easier, especially as the API is simple to use. gaim-galago is a plugin for the Gaim instant messenger client. It pushes service, account, person, avatar, and presence information to galago-daemon by using libgalago any time information on a buddy is updated. Currently, it only works with Gaim 1.0.x. Support for the development branch of Gaim (which will be 2.0.0) is not yet available, due to unfinished changes in that version of Gaim. eds-feed is a tiny daemon that is auto-launched by galago-daemon. Its job is to query Evolution through evolution-data-server and listen in on changes. Any and all person and account information is then sent to galago-daemon. galago-daemon is then able to take this information and better associate various IM accounts to actual people in your addressbook. gnome-presence-applet is an applet for your GNOME panel that allows you to easily monitor a set of peoples’ presences. Though the functionality is quite basic right now, it’s still very handy to those who don’t always want a buddy list on the screen. galago-sharp and galago-gtk-sharp are .NET frameworks that wrap libgalago and libgalago-gtk, respectfully. .NET apps, such as Beagle and perhaps soon Tomboy, can use these to work with the Galago framework in a much more natural way.