Journal Journal: JHL Continued... 0.0.56 Onward. 14
JHL, the Java Hotline Client.
Slashdot archived my previous entry, so here's a new one. You can find the previous one here.
Send someone an e-mail with this link!
There's an official jhl website now, so these slashlogs aren't really needed anymore. If you have bugs to report, leave them as comments for the version release you find the bugs in. For feature requests, leave them in the comments of the version you're currently using. Be sure to note if it's a BUG REPORT or FEATURE REQUEST at the top of the comment.
For those who can't be bothered with the official site:
Here's some documentation for JHL as it stands now, since some things can be a bit confusing.
JHL is a Java Hotline Client first and foremost, although it also does rudimentary IRC, and looks to handle AIM chat in the future. There is very little built-in documentation, and its main audience is experienced hotline users who want a more powerful client to use, want to get rid of the spyware that is the official client, and/or want a uniform client that works on all the unixes (including Linux and MacOS X) as well as MS Windows. JHL is currently a closed-source beta, but once electron feels he has made it feature complete, and stable it will be released as open source.
Why not release it as open source now? For obvious reasons -- projects which do not start as open source which are released under a FOSS license too early tend to fizzle and die. Plus, electron wants to clean up his code before others can look at it and critique it
All the following is true as of version 0.1.
First off, the AIM client hasn't been designed yet. It doesn't do anything.
Second, the IRC client is REALLY buggy -- a lot of things will lock up the entire monolithic app if you try them.
Now on to the Hotline client:
There is now a way to save settings files.
In order to create new bookmarks, you enter your connection settings in the connect dialog, and click the save button to save a new connect file.
The preferences save in the current session when you click the save button at the bottom of the preferences pane, and to make them load on startup, click the "Save to file (defaults)" button.
One other quirk is that you can't do some things by double clicking -- for example, download files -- and this is considered by some to be a good thing. However, some double click features are being added -- you can now double-click in the user list to send a message.
On to the description of the interface:
The little hand above the userlist is an ignore hand; click it while someone is selected to ignore them, click again for their chat to start showing up again.
Nicknames can be tab completed in chat; just start typing someone's nickname, hit tab, and it will autocomplete.
In the file tab, refresh refreshes the subcontents of the currently selected item; folder counts belong to the parent item, and you can not upload to a selected file; you must select the folder you wish to upload to first
There is a hotline 1.2.3-compatible folder download/upload feature. Select a folder, and it will download/upload all files in that folder.
NOTE: it will NOT download subfolders or their contents.
As an additional note to downloading, double clicking does not work. To download, you must select the file/folder(s) to download, and then either click the download button or right click and select download from the contextual menu.
For Windows users, do the following to create a shortcut that's launchable from the start menu:
select the jar file and create a shortcut
get the properties of the shortcut, and replace the Target line with
C:\WINDOWS\system32\javaw.exe -jar jhl.jar
change name and custom icon as desired.
All other hidden and unobvious features are left to the user to discover at this time; maybe I'll make another update sometime.
Finally, my requests:
Red highlighting on the chat/transfer tabs when new stuff is available. For chat, it would be new chat, for the transfers tab, it would be new items in queue and transfer finished (removed from queue).
