Is there like, any UI/UX plan for the main chat view in Element X? I feel like I've been using it for a year now and every time I see an update available I find myself hoping it's fixed the glaring spacing/padding issues in that particular view.
There's a lot of talk of Element competing with mainstream chat applications, but I don't see how it does that with what feels like an incomplete UI. I also just don't quite get how you ship a chat application in 2024 with issues like this, considering chat UI itself is somewhat of a solved problem. It's like one of those things that just has no reason to be badly laid out.
(Is this just SwiftUI being less than ideal for some types of views...?)
To be clear, I like and use Matrix daily. It's definitely still got rough edges but I appreciate the work they're doing and I think it'll eventually "get there", so I don't want to just be a (total) detractor.
I'm honestly not sure what you're talking about here - the roomlist is pure SwiftUI, and looks almost identical to iMessage or WhatsApp to me. What is the "glaring spacing/padding issues" you're talking about? Similarly on the timeline views...
Can you link to a bug on github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues please?
I'm not talking about the room list - that (along with settings) looks fine and is absolutely on-par or nicer than standard Element. :)
"Main chat view" is the actual chatroom view. The bubble layout has spacing that makes it hard to scan messages - there's small padding on the bubbles themselves, but then you have inconsistent spacing on e.g if there's a list or something in that bubble, with lists in particular having a seemingly different line-height or spacing between items. Bubbles themselves have little spacing between each other, and then day separators also have odd spacing.
Additionally, I still have a weird green floating box showing up in the chat input box. It's on and off with every update and it's not click/tap-able, and I have zero clue why it's there.
I'm probably biased by the fact that the first time I got Synapse running it was the release where it'd endlessly try and fail to join a room with more than 10 people.
But, every time I've looked at Matrix Chat it's been a disaster. That it tries, at all, to authenticate every personal(?home?) server as soon as you join #matrix is... Bad, from a lot of perspectives.
Privacy? Just put up your own DNS and find out what new servers are joining.
Security? Easy slowloris type attacks at several layers- DNS, http, etc.
Performance- eagerly enumerating all federated servers before joining a channel places a hard cap on channel and overall network size. And it provides a terrible experience.
The more I look, the less I like what I see. As a potential user, a software dev, and an admin it leaves me with two impressions: sloppy at best, braindead at worst.
There's a lot of talk of Element competing with mainstream chat applications, but I don't see how it does that with what feels like an incomplete UI. I also just don't quite get how you ship a chat application in 2024 with issues like this, considering chat UI itself is somewhat of a solved problem. It's like one of those things that just has no reason to be badly laid out.
(Is this just SwiftUI being less than ideal for some types of views...?)
To be clear, I like and use Matrix daily. It's definitely still got rough edges but I appreciate the work they're doing and I think it'll eventually "get there", so I don't want to just be a (total) detractor.