Zhephree

Making some progress with sending new stuff via neato!. As I’ve demonstrated already, you’ll be able to send a contact from your phone to another user’s phone. I’ve cleaned that view up a bit.

Since you cannot send text along with a contact, the textfield gets replaced with the contact you’ve selected. Note that just because it says “Computer” it will not send contacts to your computer. You’ll have to select a friend to send to.

But hey, what’s that new button next to the attach contact button? That’s the attach file button, which will allow you to send a single file to your computer or another phone!

This gets a little tricky. Sending files will need to take advantage of a server to send them back and forth. However, luckily free uploading site SendSpace has an API and allows anonymous file uploads! So, here’s how it’ll work:

You select a file on your phone:

When you hit send, the file will get uploaded to SendSpace and be given a URL to download it. If you’re sending to your computer, this URL will open in your browser in a new tab and give you the option to download it. 

However, this method isn’t the most ideal on your phone, so if you send a SendSpace URL to a phone, neato! will recognize it and handle the download for you, just as it does when sending a direct URL to a file right now.

It won’t be super instant, and it’s not much better than email, but given the limitations of webOS, it’s the best solution.

Techy discussion: my original plan was to Base64-encode the selected file and turn it into a data: URL, send that to your phone or whatever and avoid the upload process all together. BUT, webOS can’t download data URLs (it can view them, but not download). Also, the message length for sending via neato! is only a few kilobytes, so some PDFs or images wouldn’t be able to be sent. So, server middleman is the best solution right now.

The other update is the dashboard notification.

You now have three buttons in the notification: Open Main Card (like tapping the notification does now), Open Preferences (the new preferences-only scene), Send To (send to a phone or computer).

These will provide one less tap to get to the functions. Also, the “neato!” on the right isn’t just for decoration. It alerts you to the status of neato!. “Wait…” means it is currently disconnected from the server and is trying to establish a connection. When it says “neato!” it is connected to the server and data can be received.

I’ve also fixed the ability to send via neato! from other apps and browser patches. It actually sends the data AND if neato! wasn’t previously open, the stage automatically closes, so neato! won’t need to be continuously running just to send stuff from other apps or the web browser.

The updates are coming along and I’m making progress. I hope to have it ready for early next week.