 #Smithereen update everyone asked for: quick search! - You can now quickly search for people and groups. 21 comments
One more Smithereen-specific thing I forgot to mention. When you load a post like that, it'll actually fetch the entire thread for you. I made a parallel comment thread downloader. @a1batross when comment threads are incomplete, it's a terrible user experience. And I'm not the kind of developer who would settle for a terrible user experience due to some technical peculiarities that the users couldn't care less about.  @grishka sounds like it could be a useful setting nonetheless. maybe with a switch that instead checks the ukrainian, belarusian, greek and other relatively static non-latin kbd layouts @devurandom that's certainly an option, but would you really convert every string you receive into 20 different keyboard layouts just in case? That could also lead to some mysterious false-positive search results. @grishka @devurandom maybe ask user to list languages they know in settings and then convert? That information could be useful in future.
I'm not insisting on that feature though, just a random idea. @grishka not asking for all searches to be run with every possible layout, but just to add a separate user setting that goes [✓] Search keyboard layout correction: [ Russian ↓ ] and then you get to pick whichever layout you commonly use. this could also be helpful in that searches mistakenly typed in that layout could be converted to english.  @grishka  @grishka Hmm, You can handle only QWERTY, ЙЦУКЕН. I think it'll be a nice UX for Russian users and it'll be kind of expected for other users so nothing too bad. Facebook, for example, doesn't handle even ЙЦУКЕН  Yay. PS, just in case anyone needs to detect languages, this covers 800+ … https://github.com/redaktor/languages @sl007 https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen/blob/d1433c5531be7c513860c9a369ec138afd180e92/src/main/java/smithereen/storage/SearchStorage.java I use this https://github.com/jirutka/unidecode to transliterate everything into Latin alphabet and store these strings in a separate table (qsearch_index). So, basically, search only ever operates on Latin strings. @grishka Ok now I'm curious to see how it handles non russian cyrillic characters like љ, њ, ђ, џ or ћ
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Gregory's Server
Though VK's version also works correctly if you type your query in a wrong keyboard layout. As in, "jktu" when you meant "олег". VK can do this trivially since 99% of its target audience has two known keyboard layouts — English QWERTY and Russian ЙЦУКЕН. I can't do it this easily... I'll be especially clueless if you set your language to English, which some Russians actually do.