Changeable Contact Icon Color

tcheck · January 25, 2021, 1:02pm

Would be nice if I could change the background color of the contact icons.
E.g. I have a lot of contacts which have pretty much the same color.
And in a group chat you easily oversee that someone different has responded.
(Also the contact list itself is harder to disctinct)

Simon · January 25, 2021, 2:09pm

The current color is a hash of the email address maybe we could modify that function so it can output more distinctive colors, or we could think about showing an automatically generated avatars like github instead, for contacts that don’t have set an avatar.

github.com

deltachat/deltachat-core-rust/blob/355e0145c019b2886a340e8840be00178bdf4fa9/src/dc_tools.rs#L51-L74


/// the colors must fulfill some criterions as:
/// - contrast to black and to white
/// - work as a text-color
/// - being noticeable on a typical map
/// - harmonize together while being different enough
/// (therefore, we cannot just use random rgb colors :)
const COLORS: [u32; 16] = [
    0xe5_65_55, 0xf2_8c_48, 0x8e_85_ee, 0x76_c8_4d, 0x5b_b6_cc, 0x54_9c_dd, 0xd2_5c_99, 0xb3_78_00,
    0xf2_30_30, 0x39_b2_49, 0xbb_24_3b, 0x96_40_78, 0x66_87_4f, 0x30_8a_b9, 0x12_7e_d0, 0xbe_45_0c,
];


#[allow(clippy::indexing_slicing)]
pub(crate) fn dc_str_to_color(s: impl AsRef<str>) -> u32 {
    let str_lower = s.as_ref().to_lowercase();
    let mut checksum = 0;
    let bytes = str_lower.as_bytes();
    for (i, byte) in bytes.iter().enumerate() {
        checksum += (i + 1) * *byte as usize;
        checksum %= 0x00ff_ffff;
    }

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tcheck · January 25, 2021, 5:10pm

Is there no way (access point) to give “simple” a custom color after the colors are auto-generated?
Maybe/hopefully these auto-generated colors are somewhere stored, or not?
Accees point then: Let one overwrite/set this stored values (in a permanent way)
(Or if not, create a second function that does the job afterwards or in replace from a permanent store holding the color values for each email hash, if one wishes)

r10s · January 25, 2021, 5:24pm

letting the user change the color would introduce multi-device-issues, we have already several multi-device-issues, so i am not in favor to add more currently.

also, the user-avatars are typically more “under control” of the sending-user. this is reflected better if the same user appears with the same color on all receiving devices.

adding more colors, however, is a reasonable thing. currently we have only 16: deltachat-core-rust/dc_tools.rs at 355e0145c019b2886a340e8840be00178bdf4fa9 · deltachat/deltachat-core-rust · GitHub (would be nice to have an overview of them, an image or so

if, at one day, we can sync things more easily, of course, we may think this over.

tcheck · January 25, 2021, 9:23pm

Understand.

Yet sync would be easily done via Backup manually.
At least for one’s main contacts, which will not change everyday.
(And (for me) its more about differencing colors than have exactly
the same color on each device)

But ok so far then, good to know it
(how it works and intention behind)

My recommendation (for one’s contacts) is then for now:
Each of one’s contacts should set an invidual (distinctable) profile pic.

link2xt · February 12, 2021, 7:43pm

I have implemented Consistent Color Generation specification to use more colors:

github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust

Implement Consistent Color Generation (XEP-0392)

deltachat:master ← deltachat:consistent-color-generation

opened 07:41PM - 12 Feb 21 UTC

link2xt

+67 -35

This should make colors used by Delta Chat for emails similar to colors used by… XMPP clients implementing the same specification[1], such as Conversations and Snikket. Previously Delta Chat used only hardcoded 16 colors, so this change should also increase the number of colors and make it easier to distinguish different contacts. [1] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0392.html