The time has come for a new Desktop Release! Help us find the most
annoying bugs so we can make sure this update is ready to be released on
the website and in stores.
Release Highlights
Instant Onboarding Better instructions and troubleshooting button to “Add as Second Device” dialog Accept images from clipboard in QR reader Image cropper for profile image selector Use openstreetmap in map, open map in separate window
Important: please backup your current setup (or most important accounts)
before upgrading in order to be safe when trying test-releases. You can
find this option under Settings > Chats and Media > Backup.
Hi there - I’m pretty new to Delta but have been digging in on testing the past several days to get a feel for it. Saw that there were eyes requested on the new desktop release so here I am.
Am testing from the deltachat-desktop-1.45.0.tar.gz tarball.
Removed previous DC config data and started this fresh. Is there supposed to be a “Let’s Get Started” button somewhere? 1.45 just immediately pops up with the “Add Profile” dialog upon starting.
I don’t think I like the Instant Onboarding bit for a number of reasons:
Isn’t one of the main drawing points to DC the fact that one doesn’t need to create a new account anywhere to be able to use it, because it should just work with one’s email provider?
“Read The Privacy Policy” (and then being led to agreeing + creating a profile) is pretty confusing as to what in god’s name is going on - Who and what is nine.testrun.org? It is absolutely not clear what is happening at this stage and why I should be creating an account with nine.testrun.org.
ACK! Even in the “Use Other Server” dialog, the top, and most important button according to the app, is to list chatmail servers? Holy cow! Why is using one’s email account so de-prioritized? This is not what I want to give to my friends and family. I want to give them the setup in 1.44 which was sane around using your own email account.
In the “Add Profile” dialog on the whole - I think there really should be some clarity as to what’s going on. If DC is new to me, “I Already Have a Profile” doesn’t mean “I’d like to login with my E-Mail account”, so I’d be on the wrong path right off the bat. Where’s the button that just says “Login with my E-Mail account”? (Or “Begin using DeltaChat with my current E-Mail account”)
I think this was mentioned elsewhere, but maps aren’t working due to not finding a maps.xdc file.
Using desktop to add second device to mobile worked a-ok. Using desktop to become second device kept the add-profile dialog up afterward, but otherwise it read a QR code fine from the camera. I didn’t give it much thought but grabbing a QR code from somewhere else to get it in to the clipboard seems like a lot of work, so haven’t tested.
Cropping profile pictures - if the image is small, it just appears in the top left corner of the “Crop Image” window and it doesn’t allow one to move it or resize to fit or anything. 1.44 worked fine with it. Size of image that I was using is 138x138.
I presume a couple of these should be filed as bugs?
I came here to say that the Instant Onboarding is a pure pleasure! Works like a charm on Desktop. Self-explaining.
As a side note. The usage of an existing email address now may seem to some like a second class citizen because one has to look a bit more for the next steps. But this is not really an issue. It is more less like “I am conditioned to do it exactly like that. Why did it change?! Oh, wait … now I see why!”.
About instant onboarding, the points you raise are important and part of the many perspectives which are influencing the decision; classic e-mail servers are a use case we still want to support just as well as before, but we want to make it easier for new users who don’t want to dive into this complexity.
Most of the discussion (and user testing) around the onboarding dialogue are happening in direct conversations right now, so they are not fully public, but some background about the current priorities: right now chatmail servers provide a much better chatting experience than a traditional email server (delivery speed, reliable notifications, weak rate limiting), and are interoperable with e-mail servers, so we think it is the better experience for new users. For now we will promote nine.testrun.org as a default server, but we certainly want to avoid the matrix.org problem, so this will change soon when other chatmail servers prove to be reliable.
Hi ：
In Chinese language setting, when I send a message, the timestamp at the bottom right corner is not translated when it shows “N_MINUTES:ONE,” whereas it works fine for other minutes.
Hi ， In our region, OpenStreetMap is inaccessible (unrelated to DeltaChat, as the website is blocked here). Can an option be provided to use a previous map instead? Even better, if customizable map APIs are supported, we could utilize Alibaba’s Amap or Huawei’s Petal Map
we aim to improve the - still experimental - location and map options in the next versions, so that it can become an official feature at some point, after being stale for years, with unfixed bugs etc…
the first step to this direction is to use the same codebase and map on all platform, so that the limited developer resources can be used more efficient. this is what we did with this release.
and surely, among other things that come to mind, we’ll consider to add an option to either change the tile sources, or maybe even allow the user to use a completely different map-engine
Hi, finally getting back to this. Thanks for your updates, I appreciate them!
I understand the point of making an onboarding as easy as possible without someone requiring piles of technical detail, to be sure. Has the community been finding that getting people going with regular email servers too high a barrier too often?
Also, are people equating “Profile” with “Account” these days more than they used to? I think there’s an interesting barrier created here with the initial onboarding dialog that doesn’t touch on the E-Mail account idea at all. I personally don’t read “I already have a profile” to mean “I’d like to use my E-Mail account” (or even “I’d like to use my current chatmail account”).
It will be interesting to see if anyone else gets suspicious of nine.testrun.org - I mean, I know most people don’t care to know or understand, but if I am setting up something that is heavily associated with “bob.com” and when I go to get setup it wants me to create an account at “rottingfalafel.com”, it’s all a little suspicious. How many domains do we want to give trust to?
In having someone else getting going with DeltaChat for the first time, they accidentally got a testrun.org account because it’s driving users so much toward it. This was on an IOS device, an iPhone, and it was pretty apparent that using one’s E-Mail account is a second class path.
Question: Is it by design to jump to latest chat if swapping accounts in minimal window ending up in selected chat?
I would have preferred if it showed the selected account and list of my “chats” instead. Now I have to go back with the “arrow” every time a swap account.
Help us find the most
Instant Onboarding
Better instructions and troubleshooting button to “Add as Second Device” dialog
Accept images from clipboard in QR reader
Image cropper for profile image selector
Use openstreetmap in map, open map in separate window
two bugs are already filed: 