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Comment by moritonal | Hacker News Reader

I once implemented in a dead chat-app a "typing notification" by sending both the `isTyping` flag, along with the length of the unsent message. On the clients side it was displayed as a blurred lorem-ipsum of the correct length.

It was the nicest form of instant conversation I've ever had. Watching the blurred text become a message was lovely and every conversation felt snapper rather than anxiety-inducing as you start at the "x is typing" message, instead you just watch the sentance grow, then materialise.

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Yikes. The amount of times I type a message only to delete it, people I'm talking to will probably be horrified if they saw me give a wall of text to be replaced with "cool".

"k"

https://xkcd.com/1886/

The amount of times I do the same, only to think that everything I've written sounds so self centred that it's not worth posting, so then I think to myself "there's my therapy on the subject, delete."

Sometimes just the writing is cathartic enough that once you've gotten it off your chest, you don't really need to hit submit.

While I applaud the technical implementation, as someone who needs to e to compose their thoughts and often drafts in the input box of chat apps, with the final messages usually winding up shorter.... That's a fucking terrifying feature.

Same here. This sounds far worse than just the normal typing notification. If I was using an application that did this preview, I would type up messages in a text editor and paste them in. There's so many times where I have a massive block of text that I'm not satisfied with as communicating my thoughts properly and I don't want to expand it out to an essay (no one will read that in a chat application), so I just delete it and replace it with an acknowledgement of the message I'm responding to. That would look ridiculous to other people in the chat!

For what it's worth, it sounds like a pretty useful signal to others in the chat to know you have a lot to say on the matter, but have actively chosen to say little. The ledger would show a simple message, but ephemerally you and your colleagues would have gotten to know each other slightly more than the otherwise dead-air.

I also had a limit over 52 chars with elipses to stop walls of text.

I'm of the view that pretty much everybody does this.

So I'm the complete same, but have you ever thought about how that might impact the way you communicate? I've found I've got worse at talking (verbally) compared to typing, because of how many cruxes I'd started relying on over the pandemic (along with other reasons of course).

I endlessly revise outgoing messages, often rearranging parts of my sentences to ensure what I'm saying is clear (enough). After mistakenly hitting Send enough times, especially when there's an apostrophe in the text, if the message is at all important or complex enough, I drop into a text editor first, then paste and send. This also skips the "X is typing" problems you describe.

I wonder how many other people do this.

I'm normally opposed to typing notifications, but I really like this idea for certain channels. How did you handle the case where many people are typing at once? >5 might get noisy if they all had their own lines.

I think I had it so the first three typing would be shown sorted by whoever typed first, but then ellipsis the rest. The app was designed to be a more conversation-based app with things like a room being opened with an objective and closed then they were complete, so it favoured slower conversations.

"Bob is typing..."

"Bob and Phil are typing..."

"Bob, Phil and 3 others are typing..."

one of slack's worst features

The innovation the author describes would look more like:

Phil: I'm just walking down a fine wee snicket.

Bob: What's the frequency Kenneth?

Phil: ■■■■■■■

Bob: ■■■

3 others typing...

Yes, it's certainly different from what you see on today's most popular platforms, and if done visually right (a big "if"), I think it could be very nice.

In the last case it doesn't really say anything.

Though I suppose you could visualize it in the nickname somehow. But I hate the current retrieve trend of "and 3 others". It didn't really tell you anything if one of the other participants is someone you want to know about. Because you still don't know if any of them is typing or not.

If it's important, show it for everyone. Otherwise don't bother showing it at all. But showing it for some randomly picked users makes no sense.

You are correct. I've seen this kind of notification used together with small avatar pictures of users who are typing - I think it was in Element.

Then again, in practice I found that if more than two or three people are typing at a given moment, it's probably a conversation that's lively enough already, and I'd usually just wait to see what the participants end up writing regardless of who it is. So the value of such a notification is about the same as if the all the typing users were named in it explicitly. :)

It tells you there's an increased interest in participating to the current topic, that multiple messages from different people will appear concurrently and split the topic. It's an indication you should probably stop typing, as your message will get lost in the noise.

"Bob, Phil and 74 others are typing. It may be time to leave."

There was a mode in ICQ long ago where the person you were messaging could see everything you typed, as you typed it. A friend of mine always wanted to use it and it was mildly terrifying.

Google Wave did this too, but it was enabled by default. It sure takes a while to get used to it.

Also unix talk(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

This sounds really cool! What was the app's name?

There is no reference to it on the internet, and I'm fairly sure no bit survives. Which is sad when I think I worked 6 months on it, but someone paid me to do it, so that's nice.

That's a shame. Sounds like it was great work, just the same!

Lots of my early stuff (late 90s and early 00s) has basically vanished from the 'net as well; I know the feeling.

An old ICQ chat window had two text areas: one for each user. The text was updated as you type. IIRC you could change font, color and other text properties.

If I was using that application, I'd type a long message, then cut and paste a bunch of times really fast to mess with the recipient

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