Jacki's Developer Blog

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...

Hello again, Here is a little update to the GNUnet Messenger API from December. This time I’ve added a short video to show how it works at the moment on a local machine with multiple clients. I’ve now added most dialogs to invite contacts to groups, open custom private groups, open chats directly to your contacts and open public platforms (public chat rooms). Filtering the contacts in those dialogs using a search field will be implemented soon (this is visual only for now). Sending files should work in theory already but I haven’t hooked up visually representing those file messages. But it will likely be very similar to the implementation of it used in cadet-gtk . Chats will now allow renaming for contacts and update each widget using it. Also it is now possible to have persistent chats between closing and opening the application which will be necessary for ease of use. Many bugs got sorted out in libgnunetchat but there’s still a lack of thread safety which needs to be addres...

This year I collaborated with many other students at the university on a computer graphics framework using the Vulkan API. We designed it to function rather modular and while it abstracts several parts of the Vulkan API and memory management to ease development, it still allows you to utilize Vulkan’s openness and the use of various extensions. We implemented several example projects with the framework to show how it can be utilized. There are also modules extending the capabilities from the framework to load GLTF assets, manage a scene graph, handling cameras, rendering GUI with ImGui and even image upscaling in realtime using FSR from the GPUOpen initiative. It’s also possible to use the framework for non-rendering projects like simulation utilizing Vulkan compute shaders and its compute pipelines. You can find a video showcasing the different example projects containing modern features like mesh shaders and ray tracing on YouTube . You can also find a more detailed explanati...

Because some random events and a missing maintainer I became the actual maintainer of Manuskript, an open-source tool for writers (with over 1k stars on Github 😅). I didn’t really have any experience in maintaining packages until then with the exceptions of smaller packages in the AUR . However it went reasonable I would say and I published my first release of Manuskript ( 0.12.0 ). Sure, the release had some minor issues: It crashed/didn’t start on Windows. 😓 It performed worse though of the spell- and grammar-checking with LanguageTool, I added. 😐 I had to publish a fixed version for Windows (it still crashed on Windows 7 and 8, Windows XP wasn’t even supported anymore 😕) I didn’t had any access to snapcraft.io, so the snap package could not be updated (it also contained some errors which made the build impossible as well). 😟 But slowly we got there. I’ve implemented a very useful script to automatically build the Windows version via Wine on my Arch Linux btw and debugg...

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...