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Contents

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Bugs

Bugs? What bugs? Put them here:

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Does not work with Firefox 2

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Lastlog tab explosion

When issueing lastlog a dozen little tabs are created for every little piece of chat history. We can avoid tab explosion by looking out for the time stamp which is only delivered with lastlog. Then the following snippet applies:

_message*_private is not rendered in a way that it proves useful when watching conversations again using /log. it needs those bla tells you things, i'm afraid, or at least *bla* hello - but this could be done specifically for the log-watching case

But you may also decide that tab explosion is more useful, I don't know. One way or the other we should probably automatically activate the timestamp display function, or people won't get it, that they're watching old stuff. Huh? Yes? No? Maybe?

Oh by the way, in PZ4 the clock icon isn't working!?

And when I write in place tab that has been created by /log, then instead of getting "you're not in the room" i get the history all over again... Ah no wait, it seems to be something completely different - no matter what I do in which tab, I get the mega /log command from before executed all over again. Need to restart PZ4.

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Message Loss

Grr... When typing several short in a row, some get lost, or at least I don't get the echo's back. Is this flood-control on server side or is my code losing packets somewhere? I'm confused! The socket reports successful send but no echo.
<lynX> Hm, will have to inspect this.
<Monkey> Seems to be working ok with my own psyced. I will test again with psyced.org and beta...
<Monkey> Tested again on psyc://psyced.org/@bfg and I still have the same trouble with v0.2.3...
<lynX> just tried this with PZ4 and beta. no problem!
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Timestamps broken in Firefox on OSX 10.2

Timestamps will not toggle - the button does nothing, timestamps remain hidden.

update: this only happens occasionally. Also noticed in flock on windows.

update: with PZ04 timestamps are always active.

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SSL Sockets

<Monkey 16:07, 3 July 2006 (CEST)> I just added code to support SSL Sockets, however, it's not working. If you use port 9404 then "secure" mode is enabled automatically, however, it doesn't connect to beta.ve.symlynx.com or to psyced.org, returning an odd error. If anyone wants to take a look, feel free. More details on Talk page.

<Monkey 19:40, 3 July 2006 (CEST)> It turns out that ssl works when connecting to fippo's server! So, it's probably trouble with the server and not my client code. This makes me happy.

<lynX> Sigh, I need new certs that aren't self-signed. It's scary how much open-source software no longer properly supports self-signed certs. Is this a scheme of the certification industry?
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Text Selection and Copy / Paste

It's also not possible to select text from more than one message at a time, for some reason, probably related to the way chat messages are float:left in the output window.

Resolved: in msgWindow.html, when the input text area is focused it's not possible to copy text from the chatlog area.

<lynX> I can still only mark a single line of text, not across divs.
<Monkey> I don't know how to fix that, I have tried many times and I just can't seem to figure it out.
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Notice Window

Currently the notice window likes to stay open and (at least on windows) there is no context menu option to close it. I have been looking into it but for now we are stuck with a little annoyance if notices are enabled.

<lynX> Sigh, on linux I haven't ever seen such a notice window.
<Monkey> Maybe a "tab" would do what you want! I don't know why you don't get notices but I have considered creating a feature that would use a new blank tab for the same purpose. Something like we discussed a while back and forgot to make notes about on here! :)
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Mac OS X input focus bug

XULRunner 1.9 and Firefox 2.0 both currently exhibit a bug on Mac OS X related to keyboard input focus. I'm not sure what is causing the problem but sometimes keyboard input is ignored, the fix is to move focus to another application (for example, click on the desktop or a finder window) and then refocus the app. This does not just apply to PsycZilla, in my case all Firefox windows exhibit the same behavior. I will investigate further when I have time.
<Monkey 13:00, 6 September 2006 (CEST)> Update: this may be related to some funky input focus code that I wrote in msgWindow.js. Perhaps version 0.4 will fix this issue.
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Implementation ToDo Items

Things that need attention sooner or later

  • Notice area improvements:
    • Make the notice area keep track of older notices, allowing the user to scroll through the list.
    • lynX suggests that we should not show notices from the currently active tab as those are also displayed in the window above, making it redundant.
      • I contend that some users might want to filter the notices out of the chat dialog completely and have the notices displayed in the notice area only.
  • Message Window issues
    • How to handle scrollback during a live conversation?
      • Currently the window scrolls down with each new message
      • If you are trying to look back in the message history while new messages are being added the experience can be very annoying
      • Possible solution: once a window is scrolled, turn off auto-scrolling of new content until the user is finished reviewing history.
      • Improvement: if auto-scroll is disabled, provide notce when new content is appended below the visible area.
      • <lynX> Idea: Keep older messages in an 'old' <div> which is only displayed when the timestamp button is on, so messages gradually disappear (move from current to old) as we use the chat (or whenever we ctrl-l them away) and the chat window is never cluttered by a scrollbar unless necessary... A preference could say 'Automatically hide old messages from regular view.'
  • Firefox integration:
  • Localization - anyone want to volunteer to translate the interface into german? see locale/* in the distribution.
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PsycZilla 0.4

Fresh, in the works! Keep on using 0.3x while this is getting ready for primetime!

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Room member list

I think it should appear to the right rather than to the left.. ;) and it could be a align=right div element that should resize automatically according to the size and amount of members in it. The old list was just too static. Just thoughts.

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Arrow icon controls

By the way, I liked the arrow icons because they are familiar from MacOS and directory tree views and everyone knows clicking on them is only going to change some display and not cause harm. And they are so minimal, visually.

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Buddylist

Boring, but we need one to even be accepted in the league of IM apps. Should automatically be visible once you start having friends (unless the user clicks it away). Again I would like it if it would share the screenspace in an optimal way by resizing to the length of user alias names etc. Luckily in the case of the buddy list we can enforce from the user to set alias names to his buddies, right?

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In Progress/Partially Completed

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web profiles (html) integration

Clicking on the buttons doesn't always work (ENTER in place profile?) and when it does (MAKE FRIEND), we need some visual feedback to the user so she knows.. like change the color of the button, or the innerhtml of it.

I'd like to add a lot of stuff to psyced profiles (like photos for each friend, a submit message button etc), but we need to make them work. They are more important with PZ as by themselves with /surf. And it is good if they can work with all clients...
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Higher Priority

  • buddy list integration
    • Process Presence / status notifications
  • Friendcasting
  • File Sharing
    • lynX suggests adding a throttled httpd implementation to the client! it sounds more difficult than it really is so we might just do it! :)
  • Encryption
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Lower Priority

  • Social Network Visualization [displaying lists and relationships in a nice graphical way]
<lynX> this is actually a totally great thing.. but it will only have its impact when we have a critical amount of users...! and we probably need to work more on the social functions of psyced first.
  • Flash Chatroom interface
  • package as an installer for windows
  • package as an xulrunner XPI for unix
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More Features

  • Dashboard (For tracking new / important information)
  • Web Publishing / Editing features
  • Friend Tagging / Search
  • Integration with other social sites such as flickr, del.icio.us, myspace, friendster, etc.
  • more to come...
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Notes

Best Practices, Developer notes, etc.

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Multiple-target CVS strategy

<lynX> isn't this working already?

We need to be able to build versions of PsycZilla for several different environments and platforms, however, the code is mostly common between all of them. It seems like there is no reason to maintain multiple CVS modules or separate archives outside of cvs. After discussing with lynX we agree that there should be some scripts to build each target directory structure from the single cvs repository. The differences could be recorded in some form of manifest file(s) and the scripts would remove unwanted files from a full copy of code checked out from cvs. This could be implemented with shell scripting or makefiles.

The following build targets are currently needed:

  • XULRunner (One build-target per platform)
    • Linux
    • Mac
    • Windows
  • Firefox/Flock Extension (there is no difference that we care about, at least not yet, between the two browsers)


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See Also

Read the chatlog from our brainstorm session about Client_Daemon
Talk:PsycZilla -- more ideas, brainstorming, etc...
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Advertisement

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Download.com

I took this funny suggestion from http://cspace.in/trac/wiki/Suggestions:

Download.com brings a lot of users, if the texts you proivided are as good fitting, so write about secure file transfer and messenger... and best would be to insert this tool not in the category messengers, but into mp3 search tool... of in both!! if possibel, Further you need to update is every month.. then it is always on top of listing.

Apparently the idea that open-source need no advertising is complete history. We should get used to that.