rns.recipes

Zenith wrote:

Could we get WGS84 and UTM coordinates in the map in addition to just longitudinal coordinates? I and several other people use a fork of MCX that I wrote which has this, and can ship it off as a .patch if you want.

Yes that would be great! Improving the map, especially for offline usage has been on my mind for a while.

Boltic wrote:

What do you think about simplifying the user interface? I suggested your program to many people and I saw that the person was confused for the first time and completely abandoned Reticulum and said, "What's your problem? Why don't you use Telegram?"

Yes I have been working on making UI/UX better and experimenting with various methods to help new users.

Thanks for all the work on MeshChatX Ivan! It's a fantastic client with so much functionality built in.

I especially appreciate the sustained attention to details, security hardening, version pinning and attestation, that you have put a lot of effort into. Not many applications, even outside Reticulum, take it so seriously, and that is incredibly nice to see.

While I agree it's nice to have "simple UX" for new users sometimes, I hope you won't scrape away the advanced functionality and plethora of options for us users who know what we're doing and want it there ;) I have family members in their 70s who really enjoy using MCX as it is, and find it perfectly intuitive, so take the need for simplicity with a grain of salt.

Progressive disclosure is a good principle to follow. It makes it less overwhelming for beginners while keeping advanced functionality easy to reach for advanced users.

Ivan wrote:

I have been working on various map improvements, GPX support, and ability to share maps efficiently publicly or privately. I am still finalizing and testing my ideas so dont have much to say on this right now.

Definitely curious to see your thoughts on map sharing. I had something half-baked for this about 6-9 months ago that I never did finish. The goal was to provide a way to download any arbitrary map region over reticulum, instead of relying on http. The rough shape I was going towards was that map providers (users who want to share/host maps) could announce their coverage areas (potentially by geohash(es)), and map requesters (users who want to download a given map) could then request a subset (or all) of said coverage from a known destination (discovered via the aforementioned announces).

I ran into some indecision around handling, for lack of a better term, map authentication - how does a requester know that a given map tile is not maliciously modified? You could include hashes of the tiles, maybe have the provider sign them, maybe compare hashes for the same tile from multiple providers, but this all circles around trusting a map provider, and I didn't like that for reticulum. Private sharing, as you mentioned, gets around this at the design level, assuming you implicitly trust the person privately providing you a map.

The other sticking point I ran into was formatting - vector vs. raster. At first I thought to just only use vector since it's smaller on the wire, and then discovered that the ESP32-S3 doesn't have enough power to render vector maps (and I wanted this design to work on the t-deck). This is a topic that is new to me so hopefully there is some obvious solution that I'm just ignorant to.

Anyway, just figured I'd share my thoughts here :) happy to brainstorm here or elsewhere if you'd like.

Mark wrote:

While I agree it's nice to have "simple UX" for new users sometimes, I hope you won't scrape away the advanced functionality and plethora of options for us users who know what we're doing and want it there ;) I have family members in their 70s who really enjoy using MCX as it is, and find it perfectly intuitive, so take the need for simplicity with a grain of salt.

Yes I definitely do not want to do that. I will try to find a sweet spot.

At some point it became impossible for me to copy and paste from meshchatx on android. I do the usual procedure of holding down my finger on some words. The usual thing happens of the words getting highlighted with the little teardrops at either end to expand or shrink the selection. Instead of the usual context sensitive menu popping up with a copy option, a non context sensitive menu pops up with irrelevant options like "toggle source", " download page" and " add/remove from favourites". They're all options relevant to the page, not the highlighted text.

It has been frustrating to be without basic android copy paste functionality for so long.

Awesome app otherwise.

pertinax wrote:

At some point it became impossible for me to copy and paste from meshchatx on android. I do the usual procedure of holding down my finger on some words. The usual thing happens of the words getting highlighted with the little teardrops at either end to expand or shrink the selection. Instead of the usual context sensitive menu popping up with a copy option, a non context sensitive menu pops up with irrelevant options like "toggle source", " download page" and " add/remove from favourites". They're all options relevant to the page, not the highlighted text.

It has been frustrating to be without basic android copy paste functionality for so long.

Awesome app otherwise.

I will fix this before next release.

Suggestions for the future:
Add IP tunnel.
Add group.
Add video call.
Add group voice call.
Add last seen in messaging.
Add option to download voices.
Playing media files such as videos and music in the app is also possible.
Ability to export and restore and merge discovered nodes easily (probably more related to Reticulum)

Maybe a bit of a dream(: Adding Bluetooth, and in case of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct they can be discovered and connected automatically, if possible the advantage is that a mesh network is created without adding anything.

Maybe not bad?! Ability to update rns... without updating meshchatx, similar to what happens in the Python version.

Ability to limit background traffic to receive Announces in kilobytes (not just on a server but on the entire network), maybe related to Reticulum now.

It wouldn't be bad to create some kind of plugin store or something like that so that all sorts of weird ideas can be installed?(:

When I switch to another account, all my Announces etc. change, is this extra work necessary? Is it good for privacy or what? If it doesn't matter, why not merge?

Add The option to connect to which nodes? All? Only i2p, in short, to determine whether to connect to all nodes or only the selected model.

And thank you again and your program is great, maybe some of it is good, in general I wrote it, maybe it is worth adding.

I don't have a problem with the interface of MeshChatX at all. I'm a newcomer, not 75 years old, and I don't find it complicated. I hate it if a program or app (or OS...) tries to hide complexity that the user can't avoid anyway. And: how can I estimate "is this something for me?" if I can't see what working with a program will finally look like?

Given what you can all do with mcx, and that there are alternatives so not everybody is forced to use exactly this program, the interface is already just...quite good?

What I sometimes do miss: open link in new tab, remember this exact address (aka bookmark) in nomadnet. But we are not being polite, this is no wishlist...