Jacki's Developer Blog

Hey, this is the last post under the topic “GNUnet Messenger API”. As mentioned last time I only had a few remaining things to implement in the messenger-cli application. So that is pretty much what I did with some small caveats. The only thing not working as planned is file sharing. Let me explain this: You can already write a file path to your text input and it will send the file. When a file gets received, you can select the message, hit ENTER and download the file. However depending on your GNUnet setup uploading a file might not work. This seems to depend on user access permissions of your selected files. The best work-around I know is to use a single-user installation for GNUnet. But I hope that this can be solved properly, so users don’t have to mess with configurations. More information about this issue can be found here . The second missing part is that you can technically download the file and progress of that will be visualized. However there’s still no opt...

Hey there, this month there’s a little progress again on the side of the messenger-cli application: A list of all members in a chat room was added. Private chats will now be listed in the chats overview. A logo has been created which will be added to the application on startup in the close future. The formatting of messages and members got adjusted. image of messenger-cli chat views So this how it looks inside a chat room (left side) and you are able to switch to the list of members (right side) by pressing TAB. You can switch back and forth without issues. Pressing ENTER on a member in the list will open a private chat and send them an invitation (this is very similar to the implementation in the GTK interface ). In a chat room you can scroll through the messages or write own text and send it by pressing ENTER. You can also delete any message by selecting it with arrow keys and pressing DELETE. image of messenger-cli chat selection You can always go back to a previo...

Hello, In April I could announce the release of the underlying chat library and this time I can happily announce that the GTK client got released . The first official release of the messenger-gtk application is 0.7.0 which might look a bit weird but the version numbering was inherited from the previous prototype cadet-gtk . So the actual release date (tagging the code in the repository) was pretty close after my last report in April but I still waited for the official announcement on gnunet.org because I wanted a proper packaging for users to test it out. That’s why we not only have tarballs available for libgnunetchat and messenger-gtk on the FTP server to install everything from source but you can also test out a flatpak hosted on flathub.org . From my testing so far there are still some issues regarding connectivity which need to be addressed in GNUnet itself but also crashes which are likely caused by the GUI code. So don’t expect a fully polished experience yet. But I was defi...

Hi again, Last time I had big hopes to make enough progress for a first release. But I think I’m gonna delay that a bit (maybe still this month but we will see) even though I could actually complete the things, I anticipated. However here is finally the long promised video of it running on the Pinephone Pro because there’s still much to show. The back-end of the messenger-gtk application called libgnunetchat now uses the GNUnet Name Store service to manage your chats instead of using a local directory and some configuration files for each chat as before. This means that it is now possible to start the application from any directory and it will properly sync the chats depending on the account/identity selected. Next big feature is that it is possible to generate so called lobbies. Lobbies are empty chat rooms which will be shared in form of a GNS record under a newly generated zone instead of your own identity zone. This has multiple reasons: Technically your own key could ...

Hi there, At the beginning of the month I didn’t think to make that much progress. But now I get the feeling that the GUI client could come to an end next month. Why do I have this feeling? It’s looking really good already, not gonna lie. So as stated in my last update in January, loading older messages needs to be implemented as well as switching accounts during runtime. Now it is. Getting older messages still needs some tweaking to not load all older messages but it’s good enough for now. image of messenger-gtk account selection Switching accounts was more difficult to implement because I had to go back looking into the Messenger service of GNUnet itself, fixing that the service will run as user to make use of the same EGOs as the client side library in multi-user setups. The client side library ( libgnunetchat ) now exposes each of your EGOs as account with name and own directory to store the files and configurations used by the applications. Another benefit of this is tha...