I’m happy to announce that Purism agreed to sponsor my work on Fractal for the next couple of weeks. I will polish the room history and drastically improve the UX/UI around scrolling, loading messages etc. which will make Fractal feel much nicer. As part of this I will also clean up and refactor the current code. On my agenda is the following:
Smooth history loading
Loading old messages in the history is currently a bit jarring, because the scroll position isn’t preserved when new messages come in. I’d like to address this by loading messages outside the viewport, making it so that the user isn’t even aware that more messages are being loaded most of the time. This is a crucial part of why modern messaging apps feel so nice.
Faster message rendering
There are some inefficiencies in how messages are currently rendered, which make showing messages not as smooth as it could be. Fixing this could improve the experience of sending/receiving messages significantly.
“New messages” behavior
- Re-add a “New messages” divider, since it was lost as part of the big history refactor I recently completed
- Scroll to last seen message when opening app instead of most recent message
- Fix bugs in current behavior and make sure the divider always shows up
Add day label
Add a label with the day/date at the beginning of every new day, like other messaging apps do.
Holy moly this is epic! First off, congrats! Second, this is amazing. These features, especially the “scroll to last seen message” would make the client SOOOoooOO much better to use <3
Hi Julian, I’m a GNOME user. I’m glad I can connect to GNOME developer like you right on your blog (awesome!). What a nice thing Purism sponsors GNOME Fractal. Congrats for your sponsorship and thanks for your hard work on Fractal! PS: I found this blog from GNOME Planet.
That’s great to hear that purism has agreed. Hoping good for you.