Steal photos with Emesene

[The script has been updated on 12 Apr 2008] I just adapted the SuperStealmore script to work with Emesene. As with the aMSN version you will have to change the first two lines of the script to fit you system. I also added the #!/user/bin/lua line at the top the two scripts so that they can be run just by clicking on them if you have Lua installed on your Linux system. You can download the script from here.

Emesene

I never liked Pidgin (former Gaim). I was always an aMSN fan. Although aMSN doesn't blend with Ubuntu nicely (probably because it's written in Tcl/Tk) compared to Pidgin, it has more features related to the MSN network. aMSN supports offline messages, camera sessions... almost everything that the official client does! (except shared folders I think)

Still there was some things in aMSN that kept annoying me.

1. Offline messaging was too slow. After pressing enter I had to confirm that I want to send an offline message and then the whole program stopped responding for one-two seconds.
2. The program sometimes crushed after long runtime periods. I have found in many occasions, after returning home, white aMSN windows which do not respond.
3. The program feels a bit heavy. Well, maybe... But some things take too long and the program stops responding (login etc).
4. There are many other minor bugs like false "file send failed" messages etc.
5. Connection problems. Some times (quite often) I had to close and reopen a chat window in order to be able to send again a message to a contact. Else I would get "could not deliver message" errors (or something like this).

Now I am using Emesene (wikipedia). I found out about it from a guy in my University's forums. It misses some features compared to aMSN like camera and voice support) but I really don't care. After all I use Skype for these. On the other hand it's much lighter (written in Python), it responds really fast, no crazy crashes, and lots of neat plugins!

Initially all plugins are disabled. You have to enable them through Options->Plugins. Some notable plugins are:

• Youtube which shows thumbnails next to youtube links that your contacts send to you.
• Tinyurl integration.
• CurrentSong which changes you personal message to show the currently playing song and even supports Listen! (my favourite music player for Ubuntu)

Emesene doesn't need any installation. Just download the source code, unzip it in your home directory and run a file called emesene inside its directory. You can also drag it to your panels to create a convenient launcher!

Try it! It's by far the best MSN client I have tried!

PS: There is a Windows version too but I haven't tried it. A friend told me that it doesn't work for him.