Saturday, March 24, 2012

More on Android Instant Messaging

Continuing on from my previous post on Android Instant Messaging. I have requested that the AIM and Skype Android apps implement instant messaging URI receivers on their corresponding feedback channels. If you would like to see this feature implemented sooner or possibly ever, below are the links to my requests which you can vote up or reply to. Lets hope they are listening.

AIM Request
Skype Request (Reply actually, someone has already started a similar request)


Monday, March 12, 2012

Android Instant Messaging

The only instant messaging client I use on my Android phone is Google Talk and I use it regularly. So, I decided to implement instant messaging shortcuts into CSW and found some surprises. I found that most Instant Messaging apps for Android do not support Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). The URIs for instant messaging in Android look something like this "im://gtalk/cstickdev@gmail.com", "im://skype/username" or "im://aim/cstickdev". As it is, the official Skype and AIM apps do not support their URIs, however Google Talk does.

Based on this knowledge I was given the choice to provide IM shortcuts for Skype, AIM and others which do not support URIs or only providing the ones that I knew worked. In the end, I decided to provide all the shortcuts with the reasoning that it is possible that unofficial apps might implement URI receivers that the official apps do not.

UPDATE:
I am requesting that AIM and Skype implement this capability, read more here.

CSW and Contact Names

I received feedback from a CSW user referring to names used for contact widgets. So here is a brief description of how and why the names are chosen.

First, widgets for contacts without photos will always display a name, regardless of the choice made in the configurations. This allows contacts without photos can be differentiated from each other.

Next, the name that is displayed is chosen in this order; the contact's nickname if it exists, the contacts short name (first name followed by first letter of the last name) and finally the contact's display name which is generally the first + [middle] + last names. This method was chosen from user feedback and the fact that even modestly long display names cannot be displayed attractively in the constraints of a widget.

As always, if anyone has any bright ideas let me know.