[JMP-news] New Cheogram Android Release, Chatwoot Instance

[singpolyma]

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly https://jmp.chat update!

In case it's been a while since you checked out JMP, here's a refresher: JMP 
lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a 
real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else 
that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your 
phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in 
Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

October saw the release of Cheogram Android 2.10.10-3 
(https://git.singpolyma.net/cheogram-android/refs/2.10.10-3), the largest 
release in awhile.  The app now stores data de-duplicated, so if you send or 
receive the same file multiple times only one copy will be stored.  This 
also lays the groundwork for some new file transfer improvements that will 
be coming in the future.  The app also now supports displaying rich text 
messages sent by clients which support that (such as Gajim), including the 
image protocol needed to display stickers sent by Movim users.  A form of 
message retraction is also supported, and should work with most Jabber 
clients out there.  A reminder that message retraction is a social 
convention and not a security feature -- the target still has a full copy of 
your un-retracted message if they want it.

We know lots of you have big contact lists, across multiple accounts, and 
that's why this release introduces the ability to edit tags on your contacts 
and a tag navigation widget integrated into contact search: to make finding 
the right conversation just a little bit easier.  We would love to hear 
feedback about this UI and how well it works for you.

For those of you who start a lot of group texts, there is an easy way to do 
that built into the app now as well.  When you start a "private group chat" 
and select only `@cheogram.com` contacts, you will be prompted to ask if you 
meant to start a group text instead.  This flow seemed necessary, as many 
have accidentally created private channels with their SMS contacts instead 
of the intended group text, so checking at this point was likely to be 
necessary anyway.

There are also some smaller quality of life improvements in this release, 
including the ability to copy any link in a message to the clipboard (not 
just the first one), dumping app logs to a special directory on your device 
after every call in order to make debugging issues easier, asking if you 
want to keep app data on uninstall (to make switching back and forth to 
custom builds possible without always needing export/re-import), a new 
first-start welcome screen, performance improvements, and more.

As JMP grows so does our support load.  Up until this month we have been 
managing all our support requests using normal Jabber clients (mostly Gajim 
and Dino), which worked well enough but less and less well as we grew.  It 
would be hard to know if someone else was handling a request, who had 
previously handled a request, or even what the status of some requests were 
(if they had been resolved elsewhere in the public channel or otherwise).  
We're a small enough team that we can just talk to each other to solve these 
things, but that does take time, and more time as there are more things to 
talk out.  So this month we built an XMPP channel integration for Chatwoot 
and have migrated our main support infrastructure to a Cheogram-hosted 
instance.  So far we like this a lot, and so much we've decided to share.  
If you have a project that handles support using Jabber (or SMS with JMP!) 
you can use it on the Cheogram Chatwoot instance.  Just come by the chatroom 
and let us know you're interested.  Only the XMPP channel works on our 
instance for now, but we'd be happy to enable other channels as well if that 
would be useful.

And finally, we know many of you are excited about the JMP Data Plan 
(https://jmp.chat/sim).  Roll out to the waiting list has gone a bit slower 
than we hoped, but many SIMs did go out in October.  There have been some 
bumps as you might expect with any test phase, but overall things are 
looking good and we hope to speed up the roll out and even move on to the 
next phase soon.

To learn what's happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways 
you can find out:  

* The chatroom (xmpp:discuss at conference.soprani.ca?join) remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser: https://anonymous.cheogram.com/discuss@conference.soprani.ca  or from Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#_bifrost_discuss_conference.soprani.ca:aria-net.org
* The blog (https://blog.jmp.chat), where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/subscribe-using-movim
* The Lemmy Community: https://lemmy.ml/c/sopranica
* The Subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/sopranica
* On Twitter: https://twitter.com/JMP_chat

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!