📨 Chat faster, draw faster, live faster

Something's not quite right about a public room with no chatting, so we got thinking on how to get real-time chat in a way that won't subject you to nasty things of the internet. 👺

1.3.0 also has a dark mode that responds better to your preferences, improved code behind the scenes and a more reliable unread indicator. Click 🔄 Update and let us know what you think!

Changelog

👀 Things You'll Notice

• Public rooms are now back to being live chat-rooms, instead of galleries.
• Dark-mode and other themes can now be reset back to your system preferences. 🖌️ (#89)
• Text on the join page is now more visible on all themes.

🐛 Things you hopefully hadn't noticed (bugs)

• Fixed the unread indicator so it more reliably clears the message count when you tab back in.

⚙️ Things you won't notice (behind the scenes)

• Code quality on the client has been markedly improved. (#53)
• Add moderation tools to deal with any nasties, in case they arise. (#85)
• Only some public messages are now stored for rejoins, to reduce the impact of spam.

🐱 Public rooms are back

Public rooms are back! That is all. 🐈

We had to make some significant changes to stop public rooms becoming a mess. They're now more gallery-esque.

Changelog

👀 Things You'll Notice

• Public rooms are back!
• The new public galleries allow periodic submissions.

🐛 Things you hopefully hadn't noticed (bugs)

• Fix visibility of message buttons (e.g. copy).

⚙️ Things you won't notice (behind the scenes)

• Server now deploys more reliably, and accepts more port configurations without breaking.
• A huge number of adjustments to how messages are handled server side, to make gallery submission rooms possible.
• Documentation has been updated and improved.

💡 Hey, who turned out the lights?

It's 2 am, unlike other chat applications 👻 who refuse to give your eyes the break they need, the Picto team is one of culture. We know the importance of a good dark mode. Say hello to 1.1.0 🎈

This should also be the last time you have to do a force refresh to apply an update, from now on a little ":arrows_counterclockwise: Update" will let you install the update with one click.

Changelog

👀 Things You'll Notice

• Add themes (:sun_with_face:, :moon:, :ice_cream:) that respond to browser presets (#77)
• Add an update notification. (#74)
• Implement message hiding. (#72)
• A fancy page title. (#30)
• Add UI elements to tell you if you're connected to Picto or not on the join page. (#69)
• Implement messages >5 minutes old being ignored in public rooms. (#71)
• Implement some reconnection margin before closing rooms. (#15)

🐛 Things you hopefully hadn't noticed (bugs)

• Fix a bug with text reappearing on the canvas after copying another message. (#78)

⚙️ Things you won't notice (behind the scenes)

• Restructure the project to use a single package.json. (#73)
• Make the server tell us if it's starting up in dev mode and what port it's using on launch. (#76)
• A big refactor of serveAPI.go because it was becoming a tangled mess. (#75)

🆙 Scroll me up, up up!

Thanks to everyone who reported this bug during release, as of 1.0.1 it's fixed!

Force refresh your browser to ensure you're on the latest version.

Changelog

• Scrolling on Chrome now behaves correctly, wonky scrolling should now only exist on Firefox. (9bc8b32)
• Fixed a small bug where users would get kicked for inactivity even when they were still active. (cf81e6b)

🎉 Welcome to the world, Picto!

Picto is a passion project that, in its current state, has been ongoing for about 6 months now.

Plenty of procrastination from uni work and late nights have been spent on it, and more will follow!

🐛 Bugs

If you spot any bugs, feel free to create an issue labelled as a bug and we'll get round to it when we can.

Just check that it's not in the list below, and that nobody else has reported it already.

Please be patient too; we're students and this is all done in our (questionably) free time.

Known bugs at current release:

• Scrolling through the message history is backwards sometimes (this is a symptom of a problem that's made difficult because of a 6 year old firefox bug referenced in issue #36; see the commit ec06c8b that addresses it for a giggle 🙃).

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❤️ from Josh, Eddie & Freddy