We have an implementation for translations on Weblate now! The first big languages are added. We are happy for your contributions.

Link:

https://hosted.weblate.org/access/monal/

This release brings an automatic update check for Gajim on Windows/MacOS, a big status message overhaul, and many improvements.

What’s New

Starting with this release, Gajim features an automatic update check on Windows/MacOS. If you enable it, Gajim will search for updates once a week. As soon as a new version is available, you will get a notification offering to download the latest release.

Over time, Gajim grew a lot of options to set up status messages, and it became cluttered at some point. We decided to do some cleanup, and started by removing ‘default status messages’ (default message for each status) in favor of status presets. An example: you choose to go ‘away’ (your daily walk). Instead of typing your status message each time, you simply select a status preset. A status preset can also include your Activity ( XEP-0108 ) or even your Mood ( XEP-0107 ). Removing a status preset is now possible from the status change window, further reducing the Preferences settings count. While reworking the status change window, we took the opportunity to improve Gajim’s status selector as well. Depending on where the contact list was placed on your desktop, the old status selector would sometimes not open correctly. We fixed this bug and also improved the layout a bit. Cleaning up the status message logic inside Gajim also lead to the removal of the ‘Free for Chat’ status option, because it is essentially Online/Available nowadays.

New status window

More Changes

• Server Info window now shows which IP/Port and DNS record are in use
• Preferences: Keyring (password storage) can now be disabled
• Password storage with Gajim from Flatpak now works with kwallet
• XHTML: Support for <img> tags has been removed
• DBus: ability to change settings has been removed
• Connection: ability to ignore TLS errors has been removed
• Support for drag and drop from KDE notifications (and other elements) has been added
• HiDPI improvements for the group chat participants list
• A bug has been fixed where Gajim would fail to connect after suspend
• And much more: Have a look at the full changelog

Known Issues

• Zeroconf (serverless messaging) has not been re-implemented yet
• Client certificate setup is not possible yet
• Some work has been done to get Audio/Video calls working again, however, this feature is highly experimental at the moment

As always, don’t hesitate to contact us at gajim@conference.gajim.org or open an issue on our Gitlab .

Since the last update, I have been able to implement cursor support for real-time text, support for multiple devices, and started with MUC implementation.

Cursor Support

Since with the support of wait action elements, the received real-time texts are processed and displayed more realistically; keeping the typing patterns of the peer, the next step was to implement cursor support to display where the changes are taking place.

Implementing this was pretty straightforward, just insert | character in the latest position in the label and remove the old one if present.

Support for Multiple Devices

With multiple device support, if a user is using multiple instances of Dino in separate devices then whatever is that they are typing in chat input will be synced with the other clients. This means that a user can start composing their text in one device and finish it in other.

This is done by checking if the bare JID of user account and the bare JID of message carbon stanza is the same for single user chat or by checking the resourcepart in case of MUCs. If the condition passes then just update the text input buffer with the rtt instead of creating an rtt element on the conversation view.

I faced two problems while implementing this:

First: I was using different conversations (conversation with peer JID and conversation with the same account JID) to store and retrieve action elements from Hash-Map.

Second: The chat input kept on updating in a loop for both the clients. The reason was that RTT generation is tied with updation of text input. So syncing text input resulted in the transmission of RTT which updated text input in other clients and so on the loop continued. This was resolved by using a bool variable, which does not let RTT generation in this scenario.

MUC support

For MUC only 3 Real-Time Text widgets would be displayed at a time. This is done to ensure that in case of highly active MUCs with multiple people typing at a time it does not cause any problems with user experience and to keep the UI clean and free of clutter.

If there are already more than three RTT widgets present then the priority of the new incoming RTT and the previous ones present is checked on the basis on MUC affiliation with the owner having a greater priority than admins and so on.

Other than that I resolved for removing typing notifications for those whose RTT is being displayed.

Video calls have become a widely used means of communication in personal and in business settings. Especially during the last months, people increasingly used video calls to keep in touch. Unfortunately, many turn to US-based, centralized and closed-source solutions that come with privacy and security issues.

We are now starting to implement decentralized calls and conferences in Dino. As with the rest of the UI, we aim for a nice and simple user experience. The call features are planed to be implemented and published step-by-step over the next 12 months. Support for encrypted two-party calls that are compatible with Conversations should be ready by the end of this year or early next year. For conference calls, we are also looking into compatibility with the popular video-conferencing solution Jitsi Meet, that is also based on the XMPP protocol.

This work is made possible through contributions from the NGI0 PET Fund. The fund is managed by NLnet and dedicated to Privacy and Trust Enhancing technologies. It was established with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme.

The Smack developers are happy to announce the first beta release of Smack 4.4. Together with Smack 4.4 entering the beta phase, the ‘4.4’ git branch of Smack was created. This means that the API of Smack 4.4 is becoming more and more stable: we will try avoid breaking API changes during the beta phase whenever possible.

Smack 4.4.0-beta1 is now available on Maven Central.

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With news that wechat will leave the us App Stores, one can expect it to leave EU too. I have no idea how wechat is GDPR compliant . If you are looking for something that works in the west and in mainland China, I recommend xmpp, Monal isn’t blocked in China. You can even run your own server that can’t be blocked

Hi,
This week I managed to add some titbits to existing codebase.

In my last post I mentioned that I was still figuring my way with debuggers. This week, I was able to log down incoming and outgoing texts with the help of SmackDebugger. In future I expect to log down pretty xml.

We can now specify one endpoint for the websocket implementation to connect to. The endpoint has to be configured inside `XmppWebsocketTransportModuleDescriptor`. When a remote endpoint is configured inside descriptor, we can also enable or disbale websocket remote endpoint discovery. By default endpoint discovery mechanism is enabled.

Improvements can be observed inside OkHttpWebsocketImpl.send(). There now exists much less logic than what existed previously. This improvement no longer realised the need of WebsocketConnectionPhase.ReadyToSendOpen phase. And hence, the phase has been safely removed.

Recently I started writing unit tests using mockito. I have no experience with the mocking framework but I have managed to write simple tests. It has been fun :)