andres-erbsen / chatterbox

A chat thingy

1. Install go, TOR, dename and get an account.

2. Download, compile, install

    go get -u github.com/andres-erbsen/chatterbox/{chatterboxd,chatterbox-init,chatterbox-create,chatterbox-qt}
   

3. Create an account:

    chatterbox-init  -dename=${DENAME_USER}
   

4. Start the daemon

    chatterboxd ${INIT_DIR}
   

5. Run the qt UI

    # Install QT packages -- these are the packages for Arch
    pacman -S qt5-base qt5-connectivity qt5-declarative qt5-enginio qt5-graphicaleffects qt5-imageformats qt5-location qt5-multimedia qt5-quick1 qt5-quickcontrols qt5-script qt5-sensors qt5-serialport qt5-svg qt5-tools qt5-translations qt5-wayland qt5-webchannel qt5-webengine qt5-webkit qt5-websockets qt5-x11extras qt5-xmlpatterns
   
    chatterbox-qt -root=${INIT_DIR}
   

chatterbox's Issues

chatterbox-qt timestamps with messages

UI indicates (with fade?) that you've written a message but it hasn't been sent yet

optionally also prompt the user (or offer) to start chatterboxd on the current profile if it isn't sent after x time units. But it would have to be a fairly unobtrusive/disableable feature or chatterbox would get annoying to use offline or with a slow network connection

Remove time/date information

The receiver of the message has no way to verify any information about when it was written or sent. As a goal of chatterbox is to avoid display incorrect information, the times need to go. The bundled dename lookups will still have timestamp, but it will not be displayed anywhere and used for any other purpose.

This will involve changing the filesystem layout again. We can either use the time when a message was received (which will mean many messages will have the same timestamp after the recipient comes online) or maybe a couple of words from the message.

The readme is out of date

there are simpler ways now. and different paths.

select/copy text from UI

chatterbox-qt UI doesn't line wrap or scroll

line wrapping would be nicer

spell check

gui crashes when trying to close new conversation window

I don't know how to call qml.Window.close from Go :(

chatterbox-qt: use a proper recursive directory watcher

as the daemon does. Maybe make it match the fsnotify interface.

review (and probably restyle) some markdown features

lists have huge spacing right now

Local storage message file names: more than one message per second

highlight new messages + libnotify + notification sound

• highlight new messages from when they arrive until k seconds after the chat window is focused
• send notifications of these messages using libnotify
• make a sound on received message + ui settings for changing/muting it or not playing it at all if the window is focused (or maybe punt this? it might be possible to make libnotify handle the sound)

daemon: common interface for server connections

Regardless of whether we are expecting push notifications or not.

This should be something like

type ServerConn interface {
Send(message) error
Receive() (message, error)
}

The lack of this has already caused multiple bugs and spent wasted several hours of dev time

Unified GUI + daemon executable

for users that want to start a single thing, like with pidgin. This should probably not replace any of the previous -- the gui should either have a flag or be a library that is called from two executables.

chatterbox-qt background colors for different users

chatterbox-qt: Scrollbar size changes when multi-line messages are displayed. It shouldn't.

Figure out software distribution

We definitely want to have binaries for every reasonable platform we support. We want an automated way of building them (andres will take care of signing stuff). Ideally we want reproducible builds (which is trivial for pure go, but not for QML bindings). We definitely don't want go get that automatically falls back to unauthenticated connections.

Error handling overhaul

Current error handling errs on the side of safety, but it errs way too much. Keeping chatterbox running during network connectivity issues should not be worse than starting it after the issues are over. Nothing should ever get stuck (and do so without losing messages).

delete old saved keys

After you use them.

Undo setup on failure (or otherwise make it ok to run chatterbox-init again)

I ran chatterbox-init without starting tor --> error part way through. After starting tor it gives "2015/03/13 14:38:11 mkdir /home/david/.chatterbox/david/.daemon: file exists". Either that file should have been deleted or some flag should have been set for "failed init" (which would have the benefit of making it possible to debug anything that went wrong during init)

Optimize setup experience

The hoops that a new user has to jump to directly limit adoption. For every single step (including dename setup steps), we should consider whether we actually need it, and whether it could be merged with some other step or completely automated. We will probably need a complete list of the actual steps first...

figure out message ordering

currently, I put the fuzzy timestampe into the first 8 bytes of the message hash on the server, but this broke deletion. We probably want a separate index structure on the server...

New-message-in-thread indicator

Mark (bold?) threads that have unread messages in them

settings menu

some way to edit all your protoc conf files from chatterbox-qt

Return errors from the daemon to the GUI

#18 is an example of where this is necessary. Or maybe not -- should the GUI do its own lookup?

chatterbox-qt: display a handle for non-text messages

Latency analysis

It currently takes about one second to get a message across if using TOR and a slow network. Improving this would make the user experience a lot better, and some of the latency is probably easily avoidable. It would be good to know what actually takes time.

resizeable message box

it's a pretty good size for chatting with someone, but ideally chatterbox replaces email too and it's kind of a small space to type an email in

• make the box resizable
• (later) make the box auto-resize within the range [min_size, max_auto_size](max_auto_size = some percent of the screen?)

Fix gui default display

The gui currently opens:
a) scrolled to the least recent messages
b) in a tiny window

chatterbox profile not in dename

This results in a proto: missing extion error instead of something reasonable.