First off, great job on Spark. The UI is clean and simple and has a very polished look.
Now, I have a few questions.
Could you add the ability to have the client minimize to the tray when you click the minimize ( _ ) and close ( X ) buttons?
Can a single copy of this software run from a Windows server share? I want to be able to have users run the software without actually having to install it. (I already took the contents of \Program Files\Spark and put it on a server share. The client seems to run ok, but I want to be sure it would work if multiple users are running from the same copy.)
Can the conversation window show the sending users name according to their VCard entry, instead of their jabberID? So show “John Smith” instead of “jsmith”.
When you select “Launch On Startup” does the software write a registry value to allow it to start automatically? If not, how does it accomplish this?
Could I get a breakdown of all the options that can be set in the settings.xml file?
First off thank you for your nice words. To answer your questions
Could you add the ability to have the client minimize to the tray when you click the minimize ( _ ) and close ( X ) buttons?
It would be simple enough to do as part of a preference. Is this generally what other would consider good behavior?
Can a single copy of this software run from a Windows server share? I want to be able to have users run the software without actually having to install it. (I already took the contents of \Program Files\Spark and put it on a server share. The client seems to run ok, but I want to be sure it would work if multiple users are running from the same copy.)
Yes, you should be able to run multiple versions of this since config files are based on users jid.
Can the conversation window show the sending users name according to their VCard entry, instead of their jabberID? So show “John Smith” instead of “jsmith”.
That’'s a good request. I will file that as an improvment for 1.0.1.
When you select “Launch On Startup” does the software write a registry value to allow it to start automatically? If not, how does it accomplish this?
Yes, it does write out to the registry on windows if this is checked.
Could I get a breakdown of all the options that can be set in the settings.xml file?
Of course. We are in the process of improving our documentation and I will add it there.
After a little bit of testing I answered a few of my own questions:
It looks like if you click the close button ( X ), it minimizes to the system tray, but the minimize button ( _ ) does not. I think the minimize button should do the same as the close button. I think that is good behavior.
I have a few more questions if you don’'t mind…
It’'s good to know I can run a copy from a server share. Is it safe to say that all settings are stored in \Documents and Settings%USERNAME%\Spark\settings.xml ?
Where is this Launch On Startup registy key located?
How does the application encode the password in the settings.xml file. I need to know because we have a web-registration app that currently creates an Exodus config with all the required info and then launches Exodus on the fly. I would like to be able to modify our application to do the same with Spark.
It’'s good to know I can run a copy from a server share. Is it safe to say that all settings are stored in \Documents and Settings%USERNAME%\Spark\settings.xml ?
Yes.
Where is this Launch On Startup registy key located?
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Software
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Run
Spark
How does the application encode the password in the settings.xml file. I need to know because we have a web-registration app that currently creates an Exodus config with all the required info and then launches Exodus on the fly. I would like to be able to modify our application to do the same with Spark.
Would it be more convinenet to just pass in the username and password via a command line instead of writing out the config file? What do you think the best solution is in this case?
sorry to break in on this thread, but having a command line to specify the login/password and also an optional parameter to startup a chat with a specific user would mean i could tie this into my intranet. Especially if i can run it via an applet or java webstart.
I wasn’'t very clear on how our web registration applicaton works. Here is the process:
User enters their first and last name. Clicks “Register”.
The web app inserts the needed records directly into the Jive Messenger database (I know, not the best way to go about things, but it works), writes a config file to the users workstation (which includes a server generated password), writes a registry key to start the client application on startup, and finally launches the application.
What we were going for was total hands off user registration and software instalation setup.
So the only thing that would hang us up is the password field in the settings.xml file. Can we just put the cleartext server generated passsword into the config and will Spark convert it, or will that not work? (Thats what we currently do for Exodus).
At the moment you can not retrieve the cleartext password from settings due to an exception that would be thrown, however I don’'t see why I could not fail over to a cleartext password. So, would you want the password to be read as cleartext if the decryption fails? The only issue would be that after sign-in, the password would then be saved encrypted. Would this work?
That is what Exodus does for us now; we write the cleartext password into the config, then once Exodus starts up for the first time it encodes the password in the config.
Also, I have another feature request. Could you add the ability to start the client minimized to the system tray?
I really appreciate you and the company being open to and making custom changes to your software, it’'s really appreciated.
Could, not should, cause “minimize” actually means only to minimize, not to systray exactly. So this should be in preferences and not the default value. And i’'d love to see “startup minimized” feature too
I have noticed something about how Spark works. It creates a directory called “user” in the root of the install directory, and within the user directory it creates a directory with a users jid. The client seems to log conversations and other things within this directory.
This poses a problem for us because we are running this client from a shared folder, and this would allow any user could look at any other user’'s conversation logs.
Shouldn’'t this type of file be placed in the same directory as the users config?
Thanks.
P.S. I don’'t mean to sound like I only have complaints about this client. Infact it is really good, I only want to work out a few things so that I can roll it out to our entire organization.
Thanks for your feedback – we don’‘t mind it at all. It should be possible to put profiles in a user’'s Windows home directory (Documents and Settings/jsmith for example). Would that solve the problem?
I have a few more additions that I think would be nice to have in spark.
Above, when I asked:
“Can the conversation window show the sending users name according to their VCard entry, instead of their jabberID? So show “John Smith” instead of “jsmith”.”
I asked this because we have a system that generates jid’'s that are comprised of letters and numbers so that they will be unique. So a typical jid for us would be something like: 44e08@foo.bar. This makes it tough for users to understand who the contact is when it is added to their roster, or any other part of spark that displays the raw jid.
So could this be implemented everywhere Spark displays a jid? For example, when a user searches for a contact and adds them to their roster list, could Spark automatically re-name the contact based upon the name field in the jiveUser table, or the vCard entry? Other places might include: the window asking if a contact can be added to their roster, chat rooms, chat windows, etc.
Also, I have one more feature request (for now anyways ). Could you add the ability to have a small window popup from the taskbar icon whenever a user logs on or off? Kind of like the window you have currently warning you that “Spark insn’'t closed…” when you click the X for the first time. Maybe it could say something like “John Smith has logged on”.
Thanks again. I really appreciate you guys being so open to community requests and comments.
Thanks for clarifying the vCard entry request. So Gato and myself have been talking about having a default vCard created per user when their account is created, therefore it would be easy to retrieve via Spark and we could default to that. As for the notification of online and offline, I think that would be good to have. You can track the progress of this issue with SPARK-117. Also, I have already added a new feature where you can right click on users that are “AWAY” and say you want to be notified when they are available again. I find stuff like that pretty handy. You will see that feature in 1.0.2.
The way trillian notifies you I think is good, you can set up several different means of alerting: a box in the lower right hand corner, a popup, a special sound. You can configure them based on several different events. A good way to maybe implement it in spark would be like you said, have it contextually sensitive… when they are away notify me when they are back, when they are offline notify me when they are online. But there could/should, I think, also be a way to configure these that isn’'t contextually sensitive.
This sort of folds into another one of my ideas, to make the DND more useful, but if I am set to do not disturb. Perhaps instead of having messages popup they could be queued in the background… the display message event could be used in this case to notify the sending client that there message has not yet been seen by the other user. Then when I have time, I can look at the Spark window see that I have messages and deal with them then, rather then being interrupted in whatever it is that I am doing.
Is there any update about displaying a user’'s name instead of their jid? If not, I would like to make a small adjustment to my suggestion above.
In Spark when I am replying in a chat window, my raw jid is displayed, but the person I am chatting with, their name shows up how it is listed in my roster.
Also, in a group chat, user’‘s jid’'s show up by default.
Would it be possible to default both to whatever is set in the field in the Spark config?