14 DAY TRIAL // Choqok maintainer and former Arch Linux developer Andrea Scarpino has proudly announced the availability of the second Beta development release towards the major Choqok 1.6 series.
If you're using the KDE 4 desktop environment, then you've probably heard of or used Choqok, which is a pretty cool and handy micro-blogging client that currently offers support for the popular Twitter social networking service, as well as Pump.io (formerly Identi.ca) and OpenDesktop.org services.
Choqok 1.6 has been in development for the past couple of months, during which time the development team has managed to add quite a few improvements that make the open-source micro-blogging client a great alternative to existing products such as Corebird and Birdie, both of which are written for GTK+-based desktops.
Choqok is written entirely in Qt, which makes it perfect for desktop environments like KDE, LXQt, and even TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment), and the latest milestone, Choqok 1.6 Beta 2, has been successfully ported to KDE Frameworks 5, thus offering support for the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop. Another major feature is initial support for the Friendica social network.
"We are happy to announce a new upcoming release for Choqok after more than one year and half. We want to make this release more stable than ever and then we are going to release a beta today and the final version next month," says Andrea Scarpino. "Big news about this release is that Choqok is now based on KDE Frameworks 5 and we officially support Friendica."
Twitter support sees great improvements in Choqok 1.6 Beta 2
Also new in Choqok 1.6 Beta 2 is the renaming of StatusNet microblog to GNU Social, support for removing accounts that contain spaces in their names, improved security by always using HTTPS (Secure HTTP) connections when available, as well as the removal of support for the now-deprecated Tweetphoto and Twitpic services.
Talking about Twitter, the second Beta build of Choqok 1.6 adds numerous improvements and new features for the popular social networking service, such as support for sending and viewing tweets with quoted text, support for viewing the original retweet time, and better search results when searching by hashtag or username.
There's also support for sending direct messages (DMs) without text limits, faster loading of the user list, the ability to send DMs to any follower, along with support for delete direct messages. Choqok 1.6 Beta 2 is available for download right now if you want an early taste of what's coming in the final release, but please note that this is still Beta quality software, and bugs might still be present.