Acter is in heavy development with releases pushed to the various app stores on a weekly basis (usually Thursdays—so turn on auto-update to always get the latest version. But this week we have something a bit more special in the latest version that has been plaguing us, you and—to our understanding—the wider matrix ecosystem for a while: Onboarding new members into several Chats and Spaces.
Up until now, the new person had to first register than tell someone else their username, who'd then have to manually invite that person to the every single one of the chats and spaces and finally that invited person would still have to accept each individual invite. This isn't only tedious, time consuming labor intensive, especially for large groups or if there are several sub groups to manage, it can also be quite disruptive for the new person, who has to sit and wait, all excited and anxious to get going.
Introducing: 🎟️SuperInvites
But with latest Acter, this is no more! Thanks to a server extension we've released last week and that has now been severely tested and released in Acter as well, which allows you to configure so called "super invite tokens" associated with a set of spaces and chats (the creator needs to have invite-permissions for) on the home server, you can share with anyone. Upon redeeming the token, the server ✨automagically✨ adds them into the chats and spaces, including accepting the invite on their behalf. Acter, too, has an auto-redemption mode built in that attempt to redeem the registration token as a super invite leading to a neat user-registers-and-is-right-at-home-flow.
See yourself:
Neat, isn't it? The same registration path you know and love from other chat apps: one token to rule them all. Oh, and I forgot to mention the "create a DM with me"-flag allowing the creator to directly be invited in a chat created by the redeeming user. The screen shows that first chat at the end.
Stateful navigation
Another enhancement we made recently and that is available in the latest released version is an overhaul of the navigation infrastructure. Among several fixes (you might noticed weird opening of the chat or space views) the so-called stateful navigation allows for a much smoother nicer back and forth between several parts of the application with the subtree staying at the last opened route...
Did I lose you? Too much tech mumbo jumbo? Well, just take a look. Starting from the previous screen, pay attention to the different state being held on the bottom navigation. *chefs_kiss*
And more
Of course there are several other bug fixes and enhancements in this release again, as for every we release we do every week. Like a cleanup of the activities screen, removing the double-session entry upon registration, a fix for the accepting chat invite stalling bug, and several more.
So, if you haven't used it in a while, we recommend to go ahead and give it a spin again. A lot of great things have changed since we initially went to the app stores. Just search for "acter" in the Apple AppStore, Google PlayStore, the Microsoft Store or—and that is also new—use our Flatpak Repo for Linux Installations.