GNUnet Messenger API: January

Hi again,

This is the first monthly report of this new year about the GNUnet Messenger API. There’s no new video to share this time but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to show.

animation of file preview in messenger-gtk

As I teased last time that sending files should work already in theory. Well, now it works… actually. But it needed more changes internally in libgnunetchat than I thought. I also implemented visual previews for images and GIF animations as you can see.

Users will be able to select which files can be downloaded automatically depending on its sender, size and chat. But currently each file has to be downloaded manually. Files besides images and simple animations can also be opened via default application.

I should also add for everyone interested in the security behind the scenes that the files will be encrypted with AES and TwoFish before being shared using the FS submodule from GNUnet. Then the used and randomly generated key and the files hash will be sent via the Messenger service to the receivers. So they are able to download, decrypt and verify the file. Others won’t be able to that though.

image of file transfer in messenger-gtk

Besides file sharing I could also fix multiple issues regards thread safety I talked about last month and the application will now use libnotify to notice its user of arriving messages. With these changes messenger-gtk is now comparable in features to the older cadet-gtk application.

It is now possible to select messages for further operations (like deletion for example which will be hooked up soon) as well and all messages will be sorted by date already. This makes it possible to load/synchronize older messages out of order via the Messenger service.

But this is just one piece of the puzzle to keep older messages between sessions alive. Switching between multiple accounts is still not yet implemented and it’s important to not load all messages into memory at once if not necessary. Overall the application still targets a Pinephone and other low powered devices as well.

So the next things on my list to implement is message synchronization, account switching and exchanging contact details via GNS of course. After that I will probably start working on the CLI.

Kind regards,
Jacki

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