> Each RingID has 40 characters
picture an md5 string but with 40chrs to imagine what your userid looks like. Yes, you need to supply this userid to others for them to contact you.
> We haven't had time to add contact managing features (adding, editing, etc.) to Ring yet as its not the priority in the alpha stage
Dust off the old rolodex for those 40 character strings, there's no way to save your contacts.
> The Ring OpenDHT network is new and it may take up to a few minutes to discover Ring nodes around and reach your partner's machine.
It can take minutes to set up a call. Long distance phonecalls in the 80s were faster
> Ring can usually reach computers behind a NAT provided that you have checked the Allow UPnP setting
So no corporate use then.
However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username->user ID mapping. It'll allow people who want UX to use this while leaving the use of raw user IDs if people don't want to depend on a central directory server.
For the other issues it's very surprising that Skype (which used to be a P2P protocol) managed to solve them like 10 years ago and yet the Ring people still can't (or don't want to) solve those issues. But hey, freedom is more important than UX so screw it.
Sucks that we can't just revive the design of classic Skype (but open source) before MS ruined it (not that it didn't have wiretapping capabilities before as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security ). I guess the linked project is the closest thing to that.
This is already the case, you can associate your ID with a user name. Perhaps their FAQ should be updated.
EDIT: It's mentioned in the announcement:
> Support of an Ethereum blockchain as a distributed public user database
Will I have to pay with ETH to have an username linked to my ID?
Not to say it's perfect, for sure.
[1]: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...
To by-pass the 40 char ID you can use the name registration system offered by Ring and register a username as you like. The option is available at the account creation and in the settings. you can also use a QRcode on android
> We haven't had time to add contact managing features (adding, editing, etc.) to Ring yet as its not the priority in the alpha stage
The contacts are are present as an internal funtion in Ring, only external sources of contacts are not supported yet.
> The Ring OpenDHT network is new and it may take up to a few minutes to discover Ring nodes around and reach your partner's machine.
It is a worst case scenario, usually takes 10 seconds
> Ring can usually reach computers behind a NAT provided that you have checked the Allow UPnP setting
It also works without uPnP but with less quality (using STUN or TURN)
re: your edit - if there are answers to these problems the FAQ really could do with an update
This has me thinking that IDs could be images. And by images I mean QR codes, or better yet something like the little symbols used on stack overflow. In fact, how about a QR code that is your public key? Now you can send someone your key via a single image rather than copy/pasting a bunch of gibberish. The key image could also contain a fancy border or an actual photo above the QR of the key. So then if you text someone your image/QR and they add that to their contacts, any app that can access the contact info can also get your public key.
Just thinking out loud, er... in text.
And more thinking.. This does not address management of your private key at all.
We can't escape this because the canonical user ID is a public key (IMHO, that's a good thing) however there are some ways to transfer this information easily among users -- copy and paste is trivial and so are QR-codes (which are also nice for face-to-face authentication, but making them obligatory as in Brian is counter-productive).
Tox solved this by having an optional DNS-based username registration system. Not completely distributed, but decentralized and no harder to use than an email address -- with a bonus that it may be an actual email address for people and organizations with their own domain.
Is somewhat sad Tox didn't got used, it was pretty advanced even years ago.
However here we're talking about a chat client - something that should be easy to use by anyone, including your grandma. And so far, GNU and similar free software projects have failed to ship anything usable by a non-technical user.
Finally, GCC or GIMP doesn't fail because not many people use it whereas a chat client fades into irrelevance if nobody uses it, so even the tech people will abandon it.
Take a look at Mozilla - despite being free and open source they nailed their UX. Go to https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/new/ and notice how there's no mention of "open source" nor "mailing list" nor "./configure && make". Instead there's a list of reasons an average user would like to use it and a download button that gives you a ready to use binary.
I mean, just look at the download page for Spotify on Linux. "repository signing keys", "keyserver", "sudo apt-get". I can see a non-technical person thinking: "WTF is that? Where's the installer? Where's the DMG file?"
I remember an argument with someone on IRC about Linux and the person actually said that everybody should learn commands and those who don't are simply lazy and dumb.
This mentality is problematic and toxic for the cause of FOSS.