Jacki's Developer Blog

Hi again, I finally managed to get some more time working on the Messenger project and there have actually been quite some changes. First of all I added multiple views with sub-windows in the messenger-cli application. So essentially a really awesome aspect of ncurses was that you could draw content inside a so called window but also create sub-windows inside of another window. That means the whole implementation I’ve worked on before could be reused to merge multiple views in a custom layout, I just had to implement. So the results looks like this: image of messenger-cli in group chat The layout depends on the size/resolution of your terminal and will adjust dynamically if you resize it. So for example if you decrease the width the list of members in a chat will hide but it’s still accessible via pressing TAB. I tried to make the experience pretty smooth and used a lot of knowledge from working with libhandy on the convergent GUI from the messenger-gtk application. So I hop...

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...

Hi there, I just wanted to share a little report to the monthly progress of the GNUnet Messenger API from November. image of chat in messenger-gtk I’ve made quite some progress this month which can be followed visually this time because I focused on the GUI application with GTK+ for the most part but during testing I could track multiple bugs and issues down with the client-side library ( libgnunetchat ) as well as the messenger service itself in gnunet. Some issues still remain but they are on my list. For example the messenger service in gnunet has to be run as user currently to work as intended with the user’s ego keys from the identity service. This doesn’t make much sense because the messenger service integrates some optimizations for multi-user setups. But it’s not a huge issue for now and I probably have a solution to it in mind. The GUI application can now practically handle multiple chats in parallel. For now only public chats are available and I started the implementa...