Development Log Week 69

This week we prepped for our simulogics HQ meeting next week and polished the chat system.

Martin

Michi and I will meet at simulogics HQ for all of next week, so I tried to get as many distractions off my to-do list as possible. This means that besides some planning and minor bugfixes I mostly worked projects other than Prosperous Universe, so once again, no noteworthy news from my side in week 69.

Michi

Last week I split the old Chat window up into a channel list and a channel tile. I spent most of the week on refining both elements.

For starters I had to get rid of some code that only made sense in the old version when only one chat could be active at any time since all chats have been in tabs. There has been the distinction of leaving a channel and passivating a channel. Passivation would remove the chat's tab from the component and put the chat into a list of recent conversations. The user didn't receive any message notifications for passivated chats. The reason to implement passivation was of course to be able to reduce the amount of open tabs in the chat component.

The passivation concept doesn't make any sense in the new tiled approach. Instead we removed it and replaced it with a button in each channel to mute the conversation.

It works like this: Imagine you have a lot of channels you participate in and in the current screen there is the channel list, two private channels and one group channel. Whenever a new message arrives the new message notification will show. If you hit the mute button of one of these channels because you don't want to get notified each time someone writes a message in the very busy group channel it will get muted. The channel itself will remain visible and you will still be able to receive new messages. That way you can keep an eye on the channel but won't be flooded with notifications. In the channel list the channels are now being sorted by last activity. Muted channels appear greyed out and their sort criteria is not the last activity but the timestamp they were muted. Muted channels will slowly move down in the channel list.

Besides these bigger changes I added quite a few minor improvements like styling, date and time formatting, pluralisation of messages etc. pp.