Matokai — Screen-sharing & Better Messaging

Date: 9/24/2023

Hello everyone. It's that time again; time to talk about the development of Matokai! I've been working on further improving the messaging experience and implementing screen-sharing.

As you might have noticed, I have not been posting in a while. I can not guarantee weekly updates, I have been busy in the past few months. I do apologize for this. I thank all of you for sticking with me as I develop the Matokai platform.

Let's dive in the newly added features since the last post!

Screen-sharing

It is now possible to select a window to start sharing your screen with people who are in your call! Now you can watch each other browse websites, play games and much more.

Screen-sharing my website to showcase the screen-share functionality. I might work on making the user interface nicer so that it becomes more visible and adding a full-screen button.

Collaborate, watch. You can do all of this now! Currently, there is no limit in the quality and the quality of your stream is entirely decided on your network quality and the load on the Matokai server. I do not plan to impose artificial limitations here. Enjoy.

Markdown

Users can now use markdown in their messages to add some spice to their messages. It works just as you'd expect!

This is a sample message that is using markdown!

You can now be bolder or quite the opposite, it's all a possibility now!

Image Previews

Users can now click on uploaded images to expand them and view a bigger version of them.

This is how it looks like! You can use your arrow keys to cycle through any other image that may be present as well.

It is also possible to view the image in your browser. Simply hover your cursor over the image and the "Open in Browser" button will become visible!

Improved System Messages

Previously, system messages were a hard-coded string that did not support translations and did not take username changes in account. That needed to change and so it has!

Three types of system messages for your viewing

These messages support localization as well and now have a nice small profile picture of the user the system message may be about to provide additional context.

Additional improvement and fixes

I have also been working on improving what's already there. Here's a quick list of everything that is noteworthy.

  1. You can no longer call users who are not your friend. Previously, there was no check for this.
  2. If you are still in a call with someone who blocks you or unfriends you, the call ends as well.
  3. The incoming call sound now stops once you click outside of the incoming call dialog.
  4. Once you have been removed from a chat, the client now properly clears out the messages from memory.
  5. I have added a few rate limits here and there to prevent abuse.
  6. Context menus are now translated into both English and Dutch with more languages to come later.
  7. I have done some slight improvements to the user interface. Notably, the user card and the menu on top - scroll back up to see this.
  8. I have purchased a license to use sounds for when you join and leave a call, start a Mato session, receive a call and mute/un-mute your microphone.

Thank you!

I know it has been a while since my last post, so if you are still following along I can not do anything but thank you for your dedication. I will do my best to post more often and work on Matokai more often as well. I'm excited to build this and I hope that you are just as excited as I am.

Development on Matokai has been ongoing during the time of silence and has not halted. I do not intend to halt development or otherwise cancel it. I have made an internal to-do list for each component of Matokai and have been slowly working on each point. The next post will cover some of these points.

Thanks a lot for sticking with me and following the development of this project I am very excited about.
— Icseon