Subj : Re: v0.6 ideas?
To   : Alpha
From : apam
Date : Tue Nov 24 2020 11:26:52

 > Having a web view certainly seems to be a solution--but the software
 > author would essentially need to create an entire framework (like
 > Synchronet does). Seems like a *lot* of work, especially when it's
 > practically just another screen size that needs to be supported by the
 > client and server. 

It wasn't too hard with magicka, I used libmicrohttpd which is a library
to implement a webserver, all I had to do was write the page generation -
this was a bit harder using C as opposed to some more friendly web
language like php.

The good thing about a web interface though is it doesn't only need to be
working on a mobile phone, you can use it on a computer to check messages
without logging in to the bbs - which can be useful if it's not your
computer (most computers have a web browser, not so many a bbs telnet/ssh
client) 

 > This is a bit of a hack, and maybe an aside, but I wanted to do small
 > proof of concept on this. I'm leaning Go (golang) right now, and it's
 > pretty trivial to spin up a tcp (telnet) server. So...

Had a look at your screenshot, very cool. 

The downside to using a bbs on a phone, and also a web interface on a
phone is the width doesn't play nice with things like ansi messages that
are formatted for 80 columns. On a web interface at least you can scroll
around to see the message, on a small terminal it would look all wrong.

Still, if you don't mind skipping ansi messages, it could work. It would
be lots of fun rewapping messages (sarcasm lol I hate rewrapping
messages) due to many systems formatting messages at around 80 columns.
(including this one, which I really should fix... just not sure how.)

 > Of course, there's more to a BBS than a welcome screen. I think menus
 > would be
 > easy to handle as art, it's more things like the FSE, wrapping, etc. I
 > could also see, essentially a specific BBS-based term app--like
 > MagiTerm or SyncTerm for iOS/Android.

Yep, writing a BBS package isn't super hard, once you have a basic
structure to manage users and the connection, the rest kind of falls into
place.

Good luck with your project!

Andrew


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