This past Friday the GAIM team had pushed out the sixth beta from the GAIM 2.0.0 branch. This release came two months after GAIM 2.0.0 Beta 5, and this week's release is likely to be the last release before going gold. The release notes only mention a stack of user interface changes, some Google Talk features, a collection of crash fixes, and a handful of new plug-ins. The new plug-ins is the focus of today's coverage.



The plug-ins merged with GAIM 2.0.0 Beta 6 include autoaccept, autoreply, buddynote, convcolors, markerline, newline, and offlinemsg.



Beginning with Autoaccept, this plug-in allows file transfers to automatically start from selected users. This plug-in will automatically save files to a specified location and the user has the option of automatically rejecting file transfers from users not in their buddy list. Another option with Autoaccept is to prompt the user when an auto-accepted file was transferred successfully (and a conversation between the sender and user is not currently active).



Autoreply does what it says, and automatically sends a pre-defined message to all message senders. This plug-in is compatible with all supported GAIM protocols, and the options include the delay between autoreplies, number of times to send auto-replies, and then the standard away settings. The Buddy Notes plug-in allows the user to store notes on particular buddies.

Conversation Colors is a rather convenient plug-in for GAIM 2.0. Conversation Colors allows user-specified colors and font-types on error, highlighted, system, sent, and received messages. This plug-in also supports ignoring incoming text formatting and options of whether to apply the settings to chat windows or instant messages (or both).



The Markerline plug-in draws a line to indicate new messages in a conversation. The only options supported with this plug-in are for drawing markers with IM and chat windows. The New Line plug-in prepends a new line to displayed messages so that the screen name or alias is displayed above the message. Finally, the Offline Message Emulation plug-in with GAIM 2.0.0 Beta 6 automatically saves messages sent to an offline contact as a buddy pounce. The only option with this plug-in is whether to ask or not when saving messages as a pounce.



Outside of these new plug-ins, much of GAIM 2.0.0 Beta 6 looks like past testing releases in the 2.0 branch. The notes for GAIM 2.0.0 Beta 6 state that if no major new issues crop out this is the final beta release. No road-map has been provided, but I would anticipate GAIM 2.0.0 will be out some time this spring. Google Talk improvements is one of the features I have been desiring most from GAIM. More information is available from the GAIM Project.