TryQuiet
Sticky date markers to make conversations cleaner and more readable
Nearly every chat app uses "sticky" date markers that float above the conversation view, aligned so that the date markers in the scrolling text pass underneath them.
Open whatsapp or slack and look at the date markers for an example of how this works.
This makes the date more visible, and it also means you don't need to redundantly display date information on each message.
We should add sticky date markers. We should remove date from the timestamp on each message. We should also add a tooltip that appears when clicking a timestamp that shows the full date and time.
There's another subtlety here where we should probably use "Yesterday" instead of a date, and we may want to use days of week for dates within the year, and years for dates in previous years. WhatsApp I believe does days of the week for the past seven days and then switches to a mm/dd/yyyy date.
@jgaylor if you feel like we should tackle this now for cleanliness and readability going forward, here's the ticket.
@holmesworcester I believe that we have dates markers established already. Do you want to change anything in this area or can we close it?
We should leave this one because we're doing something different than most chat apps. There's a simple change here that will make Quiet more clear and more standard.
@trahantet thanks for taking an initial look at this!
There ended up being quite a lot to it, and testing it required some changes to our tests, so it ended up not being a great first issue. Let me know if we can pick another for you!
Also, a note for QA: messages still show the date, unfortunately, because changing this requires some refactoring which I had a question about, so I created #2745.