Here another short update on my Google Summer of Code project.

I've designed a new dialog for Psi which should ease the process of joining a room. The new dialog's features include:

• all sources of existing rooms in a single dialog
• allow entering a JID of a room manually
• select multiple rooms from server room list, history and bookmarks and join them at once

Currently I'm hammering out the last couple of models for the server room list and bookmarks/history views. To round up this small post, here a screenshot of the dialog:

Psi is a powerful and popular XMPP client which runs on nearly any platform. It recently got features like Jingle Audio which enables peer-to-peer audio calls.

These new features aside, Psi's user interface is lacking in various places, including, but not limited to, the multi-user chat area. This is kind of sad since the project's mission statement includes ease of use.
The second part of my Google Summer of Code project is to improve this area.

Psi's known to be used more by power IM users than by people who are new to IM, and as power user you like auto-join a couple of MUCs and also connect from multiple places to your account. However if you're already logged in and joined all those rooms, a lot MUC software will complain that you are already in the room, when a your second resource tries to auto-join those.

Here comes another short update on my Google Summer of Code project.

Stanza acknowledgement is finally done, including representation in the GUI. You can see a short demonstration of the feature in the video below where I'm chatting with Matthew Wild, one of Prosody's main developers. He developed a module for Prosody that implements parts of Stream Management. This made my client side implementation much more easier to test.

The idea is simple: the status icon in the top left corner is replaced with a throbber animation, known to users from recent OSes and browsers, as long as there are messages that haven't been acked by the server.
Psi will at least request an ack after half a minute. However only if there's something to acknowledge for the server.

Here another short update.

Stanza acknowledgement from client to server is working now and chat dialogs get notified when a message sent by them has been acked by the server. The only thing left here is the visual representation in chat dialogs of unacked and acked messages.

After that is done I'll try to add support for session resumption and hopefully get it done till mid-term evaluation next week. Most of this stuff doesn't sound hard to implement however there is currently only one server implementation of XEP-0198 and that one only supports stanza acknowledgement, so it's a bit hard to test my client side implementation of it. XEP-0198 resulted out of long discussions in the XSF on how to improve reliability and the overall experience of chatting over XMPP. It's important that this extension is implemented so we can test in real life whether these changes help or not.

Here another short update:

Stanza acknowledgement from the server to the client is now done so acknowledgement requests coming from the server get answered correctly. A couple of days ago I've discussed with Justin how the client to server direction is best implemented and at what layer of Iris it's done best. I've modified the default chat dialog so it can be notified when a stanza which originated from it has been acknowledged by the server. This will be displayed to the end user by special coloring of the message or something similar.

What's next: