While the first Beta release of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment has been pushed to public testers on Thursday, February 19, 2016, it looks like some of its core apps and components still play catch up on the Beta 1 release.
Polari 3.20, the famous IRC client for GNOME, is one of those applications, and it has been updated to the Beta 1 milestone, which its maintainers dubbed “It’s Like Stealing Money for Free,” bringing all sorts of interesting improvements, some new features, as well as bugfixes and translation updates.
According to the internal changelog (attached at the end of the article for reference), Polari 3.20 Beta 1 ships with tab-completion for the implemented IRC commands, new keyboard shortcuts that let users switch to rooms that contain unread messages, as well as the ability to configure new connections from predefined networks.
In the status summaries, the ellipsis has been replaced with expander arrows, color codes were stripped from topics, the “Reconnect” action now works only when you’re connected, the paste confirmation has been revamped to allow users to enter text around links, and there’s now a TLS setting that can’t be turned on automatically.
More improvements, updated translations
Among other interesting features, the first Beta build of Polari 3.20 adds support for pasting images to a public image hosting service, along with support for entering server passwords if the authentication fails, and makes the “Apply” button of the Connection Properties sensitive only when there’s changes.
Of course, there’s no update of Polari without some updated translations, and this one brings improvements for the Hungarian, Spanish, Slovenian, German, Latvian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Slovak, Kazakh, Finnish, Chinese (Taiwan), Serbian, Serbian Latin, Dutch, and Friulian languages.
Early adopters and Beta testers can grab the Polari 3.20 Beta 1 (technical version number is 3.19.90) sources right now via Softpedia, compile them, and take the software for test drive to discover bugs and report them. Please note that this is a pre-release version, which may not work as expected.
Via Softpedia