Live data from Hacker News

Standalone Signal Desktop

signal.org

171–180 of 320 posts

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#171

Other than the memory usage - these are problems I've encountered thus far: - It said it was 'Importing contacts and messages' when I signed in without first prompting me if that was OK. - Importing contacts and messages failed. - Manually importing contacts fails. - Conversations show up, but each message just shows as an error. - Deleting a conversation doesn't delete it, it just makes it as read. - Messages marked…

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but .. did you report those on GitHub / to the Signal developers?

Link to lower the barrier: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/issues/new

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those core, must have features right? "Oh no I can't use that business chat tool, it doesn't support smiley faces and cat reaction gifs".

Those features are important, if your colleagues are using them. You don't want to miss an ironically winking emoji, or a gif showing that your colleague is getting slowly frustrated. It is hard enough to convey emotion and other metadata through text, but you should at least all see the same thing.

if your whole team is using IRC (or using nothing and choosing what to use) they by definition aren't using those "features".

Also, if you're relying on a stupid cat gif to judge your colleagues mental well-being (and you are concerned about their mental well-being), perhaps you need to spend more time talking to them and less time searching for dank memes.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#173
post #82

Does it still store all data unencrypted on the disk? https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/issues/1017

Wow, reading that thread basically made me decide against using Signal. For an app that is supposed to be the pinnacle of secure messaging, leaving anything unencrypted on the local device is just breathtakingly negligent. The way moxie ushers people to take the discussion elsewhere doesn't help either. It just reinforces the perception that he doesn't care.

[deleted]

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#174

Other than the memory usage - these are problems I've encountered thus far: - It said it was 'Importing contacts and messages' when I signed in without first prompting me if that was OK. - Importing contacts and messages failed. - Manually importing contacts fails. - Conversations show up, but each message just shows as an error. - Deleting a conversation doesn't delete it, it just makes it as read. - Messages marked…

Not a single of those happened to me. Are you sure there is nothing wrong with your PC?

It uses 130MB RAM here (Win). How much is it on your side?

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#175

Any reason why there's not more support for the Progressive Web Apps standard on desktop browsers [1]? It seems to me that many Electron apps these days are super-thin wrappers around a web app that don't actually need the full desktop access offered by Electron (things like local filesystem access, multi-process execution, multi-window management, arbitrary node APIs, etc). They just need a way for users to "install…

It's coming, at least for Edge on Windows. If you add appropriate meta tags, your app will even automatically appear in the windows store. The web platform is a really great example of backwards compatibility - it has to, because people wouldn't tolerate breaking changes to websites. Browsers (and Electron) have made a lot of progress in the last years, but now I think this platform is very capable and you can get a…

That's the main reason, I think: the PWA is getting there, but only just now. Discovery (mostly on mobile) and integration (on desktop) is still relatively lacking. Once those are fixed, I'm guessing it will slowly be getting more uptake.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#176
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I meant the original poster, who claims you need a turned-on and present phone for Signal desktop to work. The person you originally corrected.

The original poster was correct though. Just because you only need to do it once doesn't mean it isn't required. As a person without a smart phone I can't use it. Nor would I since it still requires a phone number to use.

They could correct this line: " keeping your phone open"

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#177
post #146
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: "One major problem Telegram has is that it doesn’t encrypt chats by default, something the FBI has advocated for. “There are many Telegram users who think they are communicating in an encrypted way, when they’re not because they don’t realize that they have to turn on an additional setting,” Christopher Soghoian, Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told…

That's not entirely true. While Telegram's "cloud chats" are not end-to-end encrypted by default, they're encrypted at rest. They claim that "all data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other DCs in different jurisdictions."[0] It's not even close to perfect, but it's also not everything that the government wants. For me, the problem with Signal is based mainly moxi…

Note that Signal supports Google-free itself now - I'm running it on AOSP without Google Play.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're looking at all the processes: A fresh launch without logging in or having it run for any period of time immediately uses 211.2MB: 1. Signal: 58.3MB 2. Signal Helper: 128.6MB 3. Signal Helper: 24.3MB After logging in and starting a few conversations I quickly see the total rise to over 350MB.

Memory usage isn't well understood. If you are using Activity Monitor on OSX the memory tab doesn't tell you much. Double click the process and look at the "Real memory size". That's a much more accurate picture of the physical ram being used by the process. It is typically much less than what you see on the memory tab overview.

tbh even that is inaccurate because Chromium uses shared memory heavily. The most real'est way to see is to note the total free memory, close the app, then subtract.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#180

Why an apt package for Debian derivatives only, where they could have opted for a snap and supported a lot more distros: https://snapcraft.io/ I'm very happy with it nonetheless!!

Or Flatpak, that would be nice. But even better would be if you could import the Chrome stuff - is it possible?
Post reply on HN