2023 CW 40 - Development Progress

The week of the underestimated efforts. 🤦 The progress, I made, is much less than I expected. The software is still not released to the stores as Project in the Google Developer Console is still not in production mode. Let's see the details

Release

This week I have been focusing on releasing the app. I wanted to upload the artefacts to the website and potentially releasing those into the various stores (snap, windows, app).

It hasn't happened. Before releasing, I need to turn the Project in Google to Production Mode. Until the production mode is enabled, users need to be enlisted as 'testers' in the Developer Console, they are encouraged not to accept the required permission when joining the account to Contexty, and they are logged out every 7–10 days (or something like that).

In order to request production mode, I'm required to create a product video and upload it to Youtube. I have been anyway planning to create a product video, so I decided to create one that I can also use on the website. Sounds easy, but...

But I wanted a short animation at the beginning of the video explaining the concept. I had been hunting for good animation software that doesn't cost much money and I can easily add screens from Gmail and WhatsApp. I have spent my time mostly of my time learning these tools and experimenting with them. At the end, I decided to use Figma. I have managed to create a clip, but that's all.

Apart from the above video, I have also signed up to Windows store and started creating a AppX build, but it's not done yet.

Functionality

There were only a few small improvements during this week:

• UI: Improve displaying media
  • Added video player
  • Added audio player
  • Marking message read by clicking media (or anything in the history item)
• Created debug mode - json structure of history item, resource and activity can be viewed now. E-mails can also be re-fetched from Google.
• Replaced old filtering solution in Gmail Plugin

Leftover:

• Gmail Plugin: When defining filters, it is still using the old filters not the new ones.
• Creating an AppX (Windows) build

Work for next week

Now I don't dare to plan anything else, just the release for the next week. I need to get the video fully ready, upload it. Turn Google Project into Production Mode and upload the app to this website.

• Production mode of Google Developer Console Project
  • Youtube video
• Windows release
  • Creating an AppX (Windows) build
• Linux
  • Register and discover Snapcraft Store
• Mac
  • Discover how to publish into App Store.
• ❓ Automate releasing

🎒 Backlog

🏗️ Platform

• UI Improvements:
  • Apply Contexty colours on the app
  • Add Contexty icon
  • Create easy to access menus (always visible icons)
  • View media in big
  • Vertical Main menu instead of horizontal.
  • Make Resource sidebar disappear and only show by clicking a menu item.
• Favourite menu items and filter based on them
• Filtering
  • Filter items based by Label
  • Refactor filtering so moving all items meeting the filter criteria can be implemented.
• Display Participants of the Activity
• Add the content of the original message as quoted text to the composer.
• 👾 i18n support
• 🪲 Switching Activity should scroll to the end (or first unread(?))
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Platform: React to History items (with WhatsApp integration)
• Platform: Merge Activities
• Platform: Get notification from the item you are in.

⌨️ Composer

• Navigating by keyboard - e.g. it's very annoying that the tab button jump on the formatting options instead of the message body.
• 🪲 Recipients are cached per integration, even though integration is not a mandatory field. This needs to be fixed.
• No attachment and images in the sent message. Something that is not supported by the system yet.

🗨️ WhatsApp

• No support for deleted message
• No support for reactions - the system doesn't have an understanding of reactions and the reaction messages are displayed as Not supported message.
• Reply functionality is not working - I need to store the whole message to make it happen.
• In general, there is no Chat creation at all.
• Read by others - this is an information that is not supported by the system.
• 🪲 WhatsApp Plugin: Status broadcast is coming in as normal message

✉️ Gmail Plugin

• Contacts
  • Sync Google contacts into Contexty
• Support for Mailing Lists - create Subactivity per mailing list

🚀 Release

• Release it❗
• 🚧 Change webpack configuration to avoid problems with typeorm migrations.