I love Signal and this seems to be a stab at Wickr since from what I've heard that is the reason people prefer it to Signal sometimes. Having said that, it has a couple of problems:<p>1. Images are downsampled without warning. There should be some sort of warning or mini info box for the times when the images are downsampled and there should be information about the changes in resolution.<p>2. If one uses it as the main messaging app, one has to search through history sometimes. But there is no chat search feature. I am forced to scroll all the way up and copy the message data to an editor. Even really basic case insensitive search would be great.
> Hexadecimal isn't compatible with all alphabets, so it left a lot of people out.<p>Not ... really. Latin characters are available in every locale. Virtually anyone literate enough to use signal is going to distinguish the latin letters A through F. You reading this, I'm assuming you're not literate in Greek, but can you distinguish the letters α, β, γ, and δ, even if you cannot name them? Don't bring up CJK; virtually no one in this day and age is functionally literate in any CJK language that can't read the Latin alphabet.<p>Let's take the hypothetical person literate in another script who is completely unfamiliar with the letters ABCDEF. They don't use our arabic numerals either. If you need to localize arabic numerals, why on earth couldn't you localize hexadecimal, too?<p>Obviously, hexadecimal is not friendly to the layperson as a means of representing numeric quantities. But neither is comparing two 60 decimal digit numbers as a means of authentication. I don't think it's inherently easier for a layperson to match 60 decimal digits versus 50 hexadecimal digits.
How to donate to Signal!<p><a href="http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/212940158-How-can-I-donate-" rel="nofollow">http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21294015...</a>
I'm not sure that this is a benefit. It gives users a false sense of security. Screenshots or pictures can always be taken on the other end.<p>Didn't signal used to be explicitly against this feature.
With all due respect, Open Whisper Systems might ought first consider fixing Signal's multiplicate message problem, especially silent (to the sender) group chat spamming.
I'm not sure I like the UX for the disappearing messages. Having a little hourglass after every message breaks the flow up. I'd rather see the message bubbles be black instead of blue.<p>It's also not intuitive to tap on a recipient's name to enable disappearing messages.<p>Lastly, maybe messaging should default to 1 week disappearing messages...
Everytime there is an update, I become more emboldened to continue to push my friends from whatsapp to Signal.<p>I just wish we had way to see what's going on in their server.
Now if they would drop the ridiculous requirement of having a phone number and go with usernames and not require access to my contact list like most other services, you could actually be safer and not rely on _their word_ alone.
Cool feature, though it'd be nice if Signal fixed the message delay and message dropping problem. But Signal uses the proprietary GCM service (because "it's impossible to do message sending correctly, so let's force people to use proprietary software") so they probably can't fix it...
> They're relatively compact. Users compare 12 groups of 5 digits with each other, which is half the size of our previous hexadecimal format.<p>60 digits have 199 bits of security, so I suppose that's mostly okay, right? Does the birthday paradox apply here, reducing it to 98 bits?
I had an idea a few days ago where you authenticate your identity (i.e. numeric fingerprint) on-demand by sending a pic of yourself where the QR code is overlayed as blacked-out pixels before being transmitted. Then the recipient can look at the photo to see it hasn't been manipulated, and use the app to verify the QR codes match.<p>I'm sure there are issues with this, but it seems like a nice feature for when secure out-of-band communication is not possible.