A bit off-topic but to seal the subject: I know that Germany is quite different from most of the western world when it comes to online payment methods. I've read in multiple Hacker News and Reddit comments that most people there don't have credit cards, only debit cards (or that at least, those who have credit cards don't use them every day to pay for all stuff), that for online payment they tend to use their national solutions, and even things that seem a bit crazy like directly giving their online banking credentials to services so they can perform good old SEPA transfers. That probably makes using PayPal, which AFAIK deals mostly with credit cards, a bit hard to use. DarkestEx can probably confirm or deny what I'm saying but it's not really a PayPal or age thing, it's just the way things are done there.

It shows up perfectly for me in Chrome and Edge.

EDIT: nope, it's broken for me too, if I resize the window so that the page becomes narrower, the "Hello username" thing will overlap with the ad or the logo.

I would just remove it; perhaps to avoid the loss of the avatar (makes it more personal), put it on the top bar somehow?

Well, this is much better, I can now see the beginning of the first post and the layout, near the top, doesn't look as "spread around" as before.



It's not directly related to the ads, but I have one more layout improvement suggestion: since the "Home »CodeWalrus » CodeWalrus Website » (...)" navigation bar is always relative to what comes after WalrusIRC (i.e. the banner and WalrusIRC are a "constant" just like the logo), would it be possible and/or a good idea to move it below WalrusIRC?

About having to scroll too much to get past the ads, this is how it shows up on my Surface (Chrome without bookmarks bar, on Windows 10 with taskbar on the bottom):


As you can see, it's not even possible to see the first line of the first post on the page, and my screen is not exactly small - it actually has an aspect ratio with more height than the typical 1366x768 laptop screen or 1080p.

Sure, I can collapse WalrusIRC, but it's nice to see the discussions going on in there. And if one can collapse WalrusIRC, then why not the ads too?

I agree that a new theme may help fixing this, as for example there appears to be a lot of whitespace between the codewalr.us logo and the navigation "path". However, white space is also important to make the page not feel too crowded, and so I'm not sure reducing it to make way for ads would be a good idea.
Or perhaps there could be an option to make the logo smaller, after all the usual lurkers could probably tell what site they're on even if the logo was removed.

Since this ad slot appears to be mainly targeted as a way for members to make "donations with benefits", I think it would be easy for members to adjust to less common banner sizes. I don't know off the top of my head what banner sizes Project Wonderful supports, but perhaps it would be interesting to try a smaller or thinner banner, where the current one is or anywhere else. If the banner is thin enough (say, 32 px height) I think it can even fit between posts without too much disruption.

Another idea is to make the banner appear in different places depending on the page. I guess this is not very easy to do with SMF, but here goes anyway. For example, on the topic reply page and maybe on the homepage it could appear where it is now, but on thread reading pages it could appear below all posts - so people wouldn't need to scroll as much to get to the main thread content.

Both the Windows and Android clients can predict the battery life of the device where they are installed while offline. This prediction is (for now) independent from the online part. If you go to the Play store page you'll see one of the tablet screenshots has an estimate showing below the big percentage, that's what I'm talking about. (The estimate is hidden when there is not enough data to produce a good estimate).

While charging, the time until charging is complete is also estimated.

The Windows client can even do battery life prediction on computers where Windows for some reason doesn't, with very satisfying results. The Android one can be slightly more inaccurate at times, but the only way to make this better is by getting more people to use it and give feedback - which has been a hard task so far.

Yes, Clouttery is still free.

When a device is offline (or on mobile data with the setting for syncing on mobile data disabled), Clouttery clients will keep collecting battery information. This information is then uploaded and processed on the server once the device goes online, updating statistics and issuing notifications.

As of now, it doesn't yet predict stuff about other devices while offline. Depending on how people are using it, in the future this may change, and Clouttery clients, at least certain ones, may get the ability to "guess" the battery levels of other devices based on their past history, eventually showing notifications even while offline.

I hope this answered your questions.

Big news! Clouttery for Android is now available on Google Play!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.tny.segvault.clouttery

If you had previously installed Clouttery from an APK, please follow this guide before you do anything.

This is version 0.9.0, an update to 0.8.0 (distributed by direct APK download) that brings important performance improvements (background memory usage reduced by up to 50%) and minor bug fixes. It also has some internal parts rewritten which cause incompatibility with the previous version, since most people will want to reinstall from Google Play, I figured it wasn't worth it to write migration code, and that's why you need to follow that special guide.

From on now, further updates will be pushed to Google Play so users don't have to install APKs manually.

~~ musical interlude ~~

About the Linux client, it's coming... slowly. I had to give up on using Mono, because even though I was able to reuse much of the code from the Windows client, I had trouble getting the GTK interface to work on anything other than my development machine (I had to compile my own gtksharp in order to get access to certain GTK widgets, and this made the process of redistributing the Mono version extremely complicated). I also couldn't get a tray icon to work in any Linux desktop environment.
All things taken into account (the fact that Mono needed to be installed, plus a gtksharp version that isn't compatible with the other apps that depend on it, plus the fact that the tray icon outright didn't appear on some platforms due to libappindicator and GtkStatusIcon problems), I decided it was best to give up on using Mono.

So I decided to take the Python base I had started long ago and continued its development, this time using GTK for the UI (I had previously tried tkinter which was clearly not adequate). This time, the tray icon works under MATE and KDE, and Gnome should be no problem either. I could also run it on three different Linux computers with different distros, after installing the necessary dependencies.
Only thing that's left to figure out is how to make the battery history graphs work, and how to distribute this. I tried using PyInstaller to build a stand-alone thing and it failed catastrophically. In the worst case this will be a ZIP file with Python code inside and you'll have to install some Python 3 libraries.

Clouttery now supports sending notifications to your email! Scroll down to the bottom of this settings page to get started: https://clouttery.xyz/manage/settings/notifs

If the "Pair with an account" window doesn't appear when Clouttery opens, you can try looking for its icon in the system tray, clicking it (a popup should appear above it) and then pressing the text in the yellow background. A window should appear shortly. If not, please try to record the whole interaction starting when you open Clouttery from the Start menu. If nothing appears at all, try to see with the task manager if there's any Clouttery.exe running.

About the Linux client, it depends... I had other plans for the next week (namely, work on the server side) but as there are multiple people asking about the Linux client, perhaps I'll work on it instead. Hopefully I'll have something to show by the end of the next week.

EDIT: no, linking dotAccounts with other sign in services is not supported at the moment and likely will never be. The dotAccount software has support for signing in with Google (that feature is disabled), but it doesn't support linking email-password accounts to social accounts. Clouttery has support for signing in with services other than dotAccount, but it doesn't have support for linking more than one service with one account. The latter functionality might be added in the future though. But dotAccounts will stay dotAccounts.

Clouttery now lets you sign in using a Google account.

EDIT: and woohoo, it has just been featured in the homepage of Cemetech. I wasn't expecting this. Let's see if it lives up to the expectations.

OK, that's really critical, so what banner are you talking about? One similar to this:



...that appears in the "Pair with an account" window of the Windows client?

If yes, what is the version of Windows in question, and what version of Internet Explorer is installed?

Have you tried again since then?

This is kind of important to make the service more user-friendly and to understand what the users need, so I must ask...
For those of you who have signed up but are yet to set up Clouttery on any of your devices, what's holding you back? The lack of clients for the platforms you use/want to monitor? Is it still unattractive in terms of features? Is it because it seems too hard/take too long to set up? Security concerns? Or is it something else entirely?

On the other hand, if you set it up but then stopped using it, what made you stop?

If I could get this sorted out it would help immensely in figuring out where to go next. I have my own development schedule, but if these plans are too far off from the needs of the people I can start by doing something else entirely.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 16, 2016, 04:38:10 PM
when I set up Clouttery

I have the feeling you'll let the beta period end, and then I'll need to open an exception for you to get the full thing for free - let's hope nobody notices it by then

It's Clouttery news time

Recently, important changes in the server side have been pushed to production:

Advanced notifications! Clouttery will periodically do an automated analysis of the battery history for your devices and warn you about possible problems. Right now, three types of warnings are supported: battery left empty for too long, left with the charger connected for too long, and battery fully discharged too often. These are mostly applicable to Li-Ion batteries, which is not much of an issue since it's what basically every laptop and Android device uses nowadays, and that's what Clouttery supports for now. In the future, this kind of analysis will only be available for paid accounts, but those who sign up while in Beta get on a special "Segvault Insider" plan which has all these features and is free for life. As a quick reminder: "signing up" simply means signing in to Clouttery for the first time. You can do so with a dotAccount ( https://dotaccount.tny.im ) or with a Twitter account. So if you want to get one of those free unlimited accounts, all you literally need to do is sign in. And for those who only have one Clouttery-supported device: this feature is the reason why Clouttery is useful even with just one device.

- Finer notification settings: you can now disable only some types of notifications for each device (including the new advanced notifications). This is useful e.g. if you want to be notified about a low battery but don't want to see notifications when the device finishes charging, or vice-versa.

- New device list on web console: when you have more than one device in your account, you'll see a new device list page on https://clouttery.xyz/manage/devices . Each device gets its own small card which includes the battery percentage and a small, non-interactive graph with the percentage history for the past 12 hours. In addition, Clouttery is now friendlier for users with many devices: if you have more than five devices in your account, the new device list will show a filtering field, which you can use to quickly find your devices by name.

- Other web console changes: There are other small changes on the web console, namely on the notification settings page and on the pairing settings page. On the latter one, it's now easier to distinguish different pairings, as the most recent activity information is shown for each one.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 05, 2016, 10:44:51 PM(I mean, I could spend such money tomorrow if I wanted to, but I don't want to take the risk and prefer saving a bit first)

Yes, this is exactly the situation. I wouldn't mind spending it on something more tangible. But a fee for accessing a software distribution platform so I can publish my software, for which I'm charging nothing and I'm not even sure I'm going to get any revenue from, doesn't leave me very excited about spending $25. Especially when I know costumer support, for example, will continue to have the low quality Google has accustomed us to.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 05, 2016, 10:44:51 PM
Also I didn't know that Chrome extensions worked in Opera, since OmnomIRC post notification feature for Chrome on Omnimaga warned me that it was not compatible with my browser.

Right now, Opera is basically Chromium with a different UI. With Firefox, on the other hand, it will be much harder to get the extension going, as right now I can't even figure out why it won't load. Probably I'll need to wait for WebExtension support to mature in FF.