December 2024 releases // Bluesky, gomuks desktop & mobile optimization

There's a Wails wrapper for gomuks web now, plus mobile optimization and a lot of features. A new Bluesky bridge was released, and the Twitter bridge was upgraded to a megabridge.

Megabridge progress

Bluesky is quickly gaining popularity and their current temporary chat protocol is very simple, so I decided to go ahead and write a bridge: https://bsky.app/profile/tulir.fi/post/3lbv3cd7q3223. It took a day to write, it's nearly fully featured and has around 1k lines of code.

Twitter testing was expected to be stalled like last month, but then Twitter deleted some of the APIs the old bridge was using, so the new bridge has now been tested and released.

Other than that, there haven't been any particularly exciting developments on existing bridges. The Google Chat and LinkedIn rewrites are underway, but progressing fairly slowly.

gomuks web

gomuks web has received a bunch of new features again, including some contributions from @JadedBlueEyes and @sumnerevans.

Windows builds with zig cc

The CI now builds binaries for Windows using zig cc for the C parts (libolm and sqlite). I originally planned to use zig for all cgo cross-compiling, but it turned out to be 2-3x as slow as my old musl.cc-based builder, so I reverted to the old system for Linux and kept zig cc for Windows.

Overall, zig cc definitely makes cross-compiling cgo easier, but I prefer speed and there was nothing wrong with the old builder for Linux.

gomuks desktop & mobile

I decided to try wrapping the whole thing (backend and frontend) in a desktop app using Wails. It seems to work to some extent (at least on Linux), so if you prefer desktop apps, give it a try. The CI builds desktop binaries for all three OSes.

In addition to the desktop app, mobile support has been improved with features like back button support, room switching animations and auto-reconnect. I'm also considering adding web push support and/or making a full wrapper app for the frontend.

New features

A mostly complete list of new features:

• Custom CSS
• Preferences, like disabling read receipts/typing notifications, showing media previews and more
  • All preferences can be toggled per room and per device
• Auto-reconnect when losing connection to backend
• Auto-reload to update the frontend when the backend is updated
• Room topics in the room view header
• Viewing shared rooms (MSC2666) and device list in user info
• matrix: URI handling
• Rendering typing notifications (below a Discord-style floating composer)
• Support for Chrome and Safari (Firefox is still the primary target)
• Rendering blurhashes and media spoilers
• Sending and rendering location messages (with Leaflet+OSM or Google Maps)
• A gif picker (both Tenor and Giphy are supported)
• Navigation via browser back button