Psi is a featureful open-source instant messaging application designed for the Jabber IM network (including Google Talk). It is cross-platform (works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X), fast, stable and lightweight. Because of that Psi is widely used. However look and feel of its chat windows is clearly obsolete.

Nowadays some IM clients offer really powerful (and simple at the same time) theming for their chats. A good example of this is Mac OS X application Adium which uses XHTML and CSS based styles. This approach allows users to easily create fully customizable themes.

Qt 4.4 comes with integrated WebKit - the open source web browser engine used by companies such as Apple, Google and Nokia. Psi is written in C++ using the Qt toolkit, therefore it is possible to create modern looking chat dialogs. With WebKit Psi will also have improved support for XHTML-IM [XEP-0071] (exchanging instant messages that contain lightweight text markup) in Psi.

The aim of this project is to create themable (by XHTML and CSS templates) QtWebKit-based chat and groupchat dialogs supporting XHTML-IM and extended presence (e.g. mood, user tune etc.) changes. Additionally, chat dialogs will be themable with the distributed Adium themes, in order to be able to enjoy a wide set of themes out of the box.