Following the official clients (e.g., DC Desktop or DC Android), DeltaTouch will soon update to version (edit: version updated) 2.9.0 as well. Most major changes as described for the official clients apply for DeltaTouch, too:
End-to-end Encryption is default now. So no more green check marks or padlocks
If you have chats with some unverified E-Mail contacts those will be clearly distinguished by showing an E-Mail icon instead of an avatar
If you want to help with testing, please make a backup of your profile first For that, click on the gearwheel symbol in the header of the chatlist. This opens the Settings page; choose Export Backup there. Store the backup file in a safe place. Do this for all profiles, if you have more than one. Alternatively, if you have set up a second device for all your profiles, these will serve as backup, too, if you don’t update these devices now. Without a backup or a working second device, you cannot go back to an older version or restore your data in case something goes wrong.
For Ubuntu Touch (focal and noble only, no packages for xenial yet):
Download the click package for your architecture hereedit: link updated, new pre-release 2.9.0-beta1
Open it with the OpenStore app by clicking on it in the Downloads view or the file manager.
Edit: Snap packages of 2.9.0-beta1 for arm64 and amd64 are available in the beta channel now.
You can report any issues here or via the bug tracker on codeberg. If you run into trouble, respond here and we’ll do our best to help you (but won’t be able to if you don’t have a backup).
Unfortunately I am getting grey envelope icons for all the avatars in my chats, except the italic “i” of the Device messages. This includes all the Chatmail accounts, which I think is unintended. The icons in the lists of contacts are still normally-coloured default icons.
Separately, the grey icons make group chats surprisingly illegible. They also fill the left column of the screen with grey squares that provide no information.
On very minor things, the install script message gives the impression that the script should not be used for updating. Maybe change “is already installed via some other way” to “has already been installed, by any method other than this script (or an earlier version of this script)”. Saying what the files you are deleting and recreating do would also make it less scary.
So the avatars for your chat partners that are shown next to their messages are just grey email icons? Do the messages themselves have an email icon next to the message time/date?
What’s the chat icon itself, also a grey email icon?
Was there an error popup when you started the new version for the first time?
No error popup, icons for chats and groups are colourful, there is no email icon next to the time-and-date. Just the icons inside the chat panes are all grey.
Can you please:
a) in a chat, swipe a message from a contact with a grey icon to the left, tap the hamburger menu and choose “Message Info”. The last line in the first paragraph should start with “State:”. Does the state mention “Encrypted”?
b) In a chat, tap on the top right hamburger menu and choose “Encryption Info”. Does it say that encryption is available and list a bunch of fingerprints?
c) Tap one of the grey email icons. It should open the “View Profile” Page. Is the icon still a grey email icon?
c) On this profile page, tap the hamburger menu and choose “Encryption”. Does it say that encryption is available and list fingerprints?
d) On this profile page, at the bottom, is there a line that says “Introduced” (should be the second last one)?
Sorry for all these questions. I’m really puzzled by this.
Yes, all of them, except the “Device messages” chats. And fingerprints did display; the app clearly thought they were encrypted contacts.
Just to make this worse, it has now fixed itself, and I’m not sure why. I had rebooted (and that didn’t fix it, I had rebooted at least twice earlier), and I’d turned “Sync all” off, and then, after a reboot, on again. Does the app rely on a connection to the server to decide on icons?
I’m sorry I can’t do the other tests; it all looks normal now.
It is possible that I did the update with “Sync all” turned off, having turned it off after I took the backup. I cannot quite recall. My apologies.
According to my understanding, it should not depend on a server connection. I’ll maybe ask the core (libdeltachat) devs, but I’m very happy that it looks good now.
Having thought it over, and heard back on the arrival timing of a message I sent yesterday, I think it highly probable that the problem persisted until I flicked the sync switch on. Apologies for my poor reporting. I’ll continue using the beta, but I can tell you already that there are no problems as conspicuous as that one!
I have been looking into this setting and I think that when it is on, all the accounts poll simultaneously, but when it is off they only poll when you open the profile.
I don’t think I’ve ever sent or received a message in DeltaTouch with “Sync all” turned off. I can’t seem to make it do that.
In DeltaTouch, turning off “Sync all” means offline mode, i.e., no profile will connect to the server. I may have to rethink whether “sync all” is the correct term for that.
In any case, as I learned, your issue with the grey avatars was not related to sync all. The main change in v2 is how contacts are handled. For that, the database is rewritten. This is not done at once, but over some time. No offense, but the pinephone is not the fastest hardware, so it just took somewhat longer than on other systems until it was ready. That the appearance changed for you just when you switched “sync all” was pure coincidence.
That is what I thought the setting did, from experience. At first I looked for a complementary per-profile setting. “Offline mode”?
The Pinephone is slow enough that some pages of this forum take 10 seconds to load (unless I turn off Javascript, which is fast but read-only). Despite this it actually works really well: it is cheap and very repairable, it is very easy to swap the operating system, apt is wonderful, it is technically possible to run Blender, etc., but anyone buying it for the blazing speed (or spiffy camera) did not do any research at all. So no offense taken.
Congratulations on figuring this out, and thank you for all the time and effort it took.
If the client cannot be set to poll the addresses of different profiles at different times, I’m not sure a per-profile proxy setting improves privacy over a proxy-all setting. Could be wrong. Proxy-all can also be done externally.
When the “Sync all” setting is off, nothing works for no obvious reason. I was temporarily flummoxed by this when I was first playing with the settings, months ago. An indicator that the client is in offline mode would be useful.
But I was actually writing to tell you that if I turn off “Sync all” and break the net connection, the client never flips upside-down, which is useful. Actually, when I turned it on it didn’t flip, either. I will try harder to make it flip later.
I think “Sync all”, proxy settings and the upside-down flip are not directly related to the changes for the new release, but more like general points. Maybe they can be discussed in the other topic, or even in a new topic “DeltaTouch on pinephone running mobian” or so. I’ll have to treat these points with low priority at the moment, hope you understand. (edit: don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for your detailed feedback. just have limited capacity)
No no, I don’t expect you to work on that. Just thought I’d let you know. I’ll follow up elsewhere once I’ve had more time.
Please do not feel obliged to action any of the things I mention; you have every right to choose what to work on, and your judgement on your program is better than mine anyway.
So, detailed feedback on readily-mutable things:
On many of the popups, the “Do nothing and close the popup” option is labelled “OK”, not, say, “Cancel” or “Back” (or “X” in the top-right corner). This is sometimes confusing. For instance, in the Device Messages chat, clicking on the hamburger menu brings up a white rectangle containg two superimposed rectangles, the upper one grey and labeled “Clear Chat”, the lower blue and labeled “OK”. It in not immediately clear that these are alternatives (not action-description and confirmation). At first I spent time in DT looking for the “Cancel” buttons, until I got used to it.
Does the Read Receipts setting toggle sending receipts, requesting receipts, or both? It is unclear to me.
Trivial correction of the punctuation of the image quality settings:
“most balanced quality images” → “most balanced-quality images”
“most worse quality images” → “most poorer-quality images”
None of these is serious, and if you ignore all three that is fine.
Both are tied in all DC clients: If you unset this option, the clients will not send out receipts to your chat partners, but will also not request receipts for messages sent by yourself. I’ve added the subtext that is used by the official DC clients: “If read receipts are disabled, you won't be able to see read receipts from others.”. Not sure whether this is clear enough? The German translation is maybe somewhat more unambigous as it states that if you disable that, then you also won’t receive receipts from others.
DeltaTouch uses the strings as defined for the official DC clients for that item, so that would have to be reported there.
I’ve just installed 2.9.0 on the Pinephone, and it seems to be working well. The installation script is much less scary (your phrasing was better than mine), and “Close” on the buttons is also more reassuring. And my avatars remain polychrome.
For fun, I tried setting profile names that began with an emoji @Raiden’s suggestion, to put the emoji in the avatars. That did not work, but kanji work fine and are more varied and independently meaningful than romanji.
I should not nitpick the English translations at you, obviously. Sorry. Equally obviously, there are no conspicuous bugs if I mention hyphens.
instead of an avatar
please make a backup of your profile first