SàT progress note 2020-W08

goffi 4 years ago jabber-xmpp-en SàT project libre SàT progress

Hello everybody,

it's been a while since the last progress note, that's because I have very little free time at the moment, and I use it to code instead of writing blog posts.

So I'll try to summarize the last weeks progress without going too much into details.

Continuing my work on improving Cagou usability, I've added a panel which shows open chat rooms, all your contacts, and bookmarks. It was necessary to have a way to select easily a contact or room, as so far you had to enter part of the name and count on autocompletion. So now, by default you land into a screen showing you icons of contacts/rooms, and you just have to click on them.

chat selector demo

In chat mode with Cagou, you can slide between open discussions without having to go back and forth in the menu. The order in which you do the slide correspond to the order in which icons appears in the "chat selection" panel. They are sorted by alphabetical order for the moment, but it will be easy to add other way to sort, for instance by time of last received message.

sliding between chats demo

I've added a notification counter, so you know immediately where somebody has talked to you.

A chat notification

For now the icons are arranged in a grid, but it may be possible to add other layouts in the future, like showing the chats entities in a list (which would give more room to display extra data like the last message).

On Android, opening a system notification for a chat message now opens the right chat widget in Cagou.

I've also improved session reopening: when the frontend is closed on Android, the last connected profile will be reconnected automatically, as well as the last selected mode. This was also the occasion to implement profile auto connection on backend startup, which is particularly useful for components.

I had to fix SRV records handling on Android: this platform doesn't use /etc/resolv.conf which Twisted expects, and finding the DNS servers used is not trivial. Thanks to some hints I've found (notably here), I could implement a decent solution to work around that and make SRV records looking work.

On desktop, I've removed the main top menu, as it is redundant with features available elsewhere. Instead there is a new "extra" button in mode selector, which open a side menu (this is how you open the "about" screen for instance).

There have been also a bunch of improvements like logging the path of parsed config file(s), the implementation of a stable resource instead of the one given by server (something like sat.[ID]), the handling of runtime permissions on Android, a better management of header's input in Cagou, many bug fixes, etc. I won't enumerate everything, this note is to have a global overview of the work done or in progress, the direction taken, and the reasons behind some decisions.

I'm currently finishing the handling of file attachments in chats, I will then move on Libervia.

That's all for today.

E

edhelas 4 years ago