This summer release is named after the U.S. gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny. He worked as an astronomer in the U.S. Army and was fired for being gay a few years later, in 2012 a Canadian amateur astronomer named an asteroid he discovered after him.
Let's dive into all the exciting new features that you can find in this release.
Simultaneous webcam and screen sharing 😄
The multi-participant call project, funded by NLNet, is reaching a new milestone with the integration of the multi-track support in Movim.
Until now, Movim was sending and receiving only two tracks, one audio and one video when initiating a call to the other participants. With this important improvement Movim is now able to handle several video tracks at the same time from a unique participant.
With this technical improvement you can now share your webcam and screen at the same time with your contacts; this can be quite useful when doing a presentation with slides or streaming yourself when playing video games.
The first step of the SFU support
The integration of the multi-track support was not only done for this nice screen sharing feature, it is also the first step to have a multi-stream support with the upcoming SFU integration.
When Movim calls the SFU (the part on the server that will take care of receiving all the audio and video-stream, mix them and and send them back to the other participants of the video call) it is able to handle two different modes:
- Mixed participants, where only one video stream is maintained and the SFU is taking care of choosing which participant of the call to show, or put them on a grid layout
- Simultaneous participants, where each participant streams (audio and video, and possiblity screen sharing) is sent in separate tracks and the client (here Movim) is taking care of displaying them in the prefered layout of the user (a grid, "current speaker in front",....). This second mode can be heavier in bandwidth but allow way more customization client-side.
We are currently working with the ProcessOne team, that develop the ejabberd XMPP server, on the SFU integration and the standardization of our work in the XMPP protocol.
Global chatroom search
Movim now implements the XEP-0433: Extended Channel Search that replaces the historical non-standard implementation.
The global chatroom search is now directly available in the general Search panel that was also redesigned to give you more compact and detailed results for any keywords you type. This search panel lets you discover articles, Communities, contacts, tags and now chatrooms using a unique text field.
URL Resolver Worker 🚀
URL resolving is an important feature that is now a must-have for all the modern chat and social platforms. When you're sharing or receiving a URL, this little feature will visit the page and give you a small preview of it even before you choose to visit the link.
This version integrates a totally new shared worker, called the URL Resolver, that is taking care of resolving all the URLs that are shared on the Movim instance in a dynamic, non-blocking and concurrent way.
When a URL was shared in a chatroom, if several of its members were connected on the same Movim instance, they used to ask Movim to resolve it all at the same time. This created some performance issues and could trigger a lot of useless requests on the server, especially when the URL was pointing to a heavy file for example.
The worker is taking care of everything; if several users are asking to resolve the same URL it will put the others in a waiting list, do a unique query, and reply to all of them once the result is handled. On top of that he keep in memory for some time the resolved URLs to speed up even more some upcoming queries.
To use it you have nothing to configure, just update and restart your Movim daemon and things will start to work automagically. 🪄
Move the actions list in the Contact or Chatroom panel
XMPP services can offer some custom actions, most often for administrators or users or chatrooms. This list of actions used to be buried in the UI, a bit buggy and not available on mobile. It is now available directly in their related panel under the "Actions" tab.
Adding pronouns support in the profile 🏳️🌈💕
The RFC vCard4 now standardizes the Pronouns field. The field was added in the Movim profile settings and on the contacts page if filled.
Quick switch between the one-to-one chats and chatrooms
Movim chooses to display your one-to-one conversations and chatrooms in two different lists to prevent some confusion. But when you have a lot of discussions open it could be annoying to scroll again and again between the two lists to reach the unread discussions.
Now when you click again on the Chat icon you can directly scroll between the two lists, quick and easy! 😸
And as always you will find many other improvements here and there. Don't forget to update, share the good news around and enjoy!
That's all, folks. 💖
#xmpp #release #movim #nlnet #webrtc
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) you can now search messages by keywords in your history and directly load the conversation from the past 🕰️ !
) you can now search messages by keywords in your history and directly load the conversation from the past 🕰️ !
