It’s been a few months since any development has been made on Orlov, not because we’ve given up, it’s just we’ve been busy with other things. Firstly, we’d like to say a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy new year, something along those lines anyway.

What’s with the new post then? You may be asking… Well today I spent a good few hours making some modifications to the code, adding some new features and some general maintenance.

The biggest feature I’ve been working on, is also the one that I am personally the most proud of. Previously, when you were connected to another user, you didn’t know if they were active; whether they were typing or not. So I decided to sit down and write an awesome feature which tells the other user when you’re typing!

To make this feature even better, I sacrificed some redundant code to allow more time for other timed functions to run. The typing notification, being one of them! This means that the notification is almost real time – when a user starts typing there is a slight delay, as when they stop typing. There is nothing we can do about this because of the way the system works – but it’s good enough!

Next is obviously the bar that is displayed in the picture above. It’s the new status bar! This will be the home of the notifications and options panel we’ll soon be adding!

And finally the new implementation of smilies! Yes that’s right! We have smilies and we suggest you check them out! Shortly a small modal window will be available from the status bar which will let you add them quickly!

So… Have fun with the new features, we hope you make the most of them

More updates have been done since the last post today. We still had a memory leak after editing the client, we quickly fixed this problem! We have also updated the client so that uses less memory, which means you should not experience any problems.

If you do seem to have a problem then please tell us what you are experiencing along with the following details:

• Browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome)
• Browser version (please refer to your browser help file to find this out)
• Time and date of connection

We will be adding new features daily, so the chat may slow down or not work properly. As these new features are added  please be paitent and tell us what errors show up as this will also help us.

Yesterday we started to work on bug fixes for the client. Here is a list of fixes we made:

• Blank chat window after sending a message but not receiving
• “undefined” messages when sending a blank message
• Memory leak – something majorly wrong was happening however this should now be fixed, if you continue to experience lag when sending or receiving messages please tell us!
• CSS font-sizes are now defined using em to retain font readability
• IE overflow scroll – it now scrolls correctly

We’re aware that there is still a problem with other users leaving the chat, we have added a “user has left the chat” message however it doesn’t seem to display correctly.

During a testing session today, it became clear that Orlov is quite the memory hog. This is due to the JavaScript coding we have used, presumably the setIntervals. These problems will generally result in a browser crash and could spread throughout other applications, however we will fix it soon!

We also tested Orlov on two mobile devices, Blackberry and iPhone. Both devices display the correct output and even style the page as intended (Me/Them) although be wary the bug mentioned above may cause your device to slow down; possibly causing a soft-reset to be made. Here is a screenshot of Orlov running on the iPhone browser (through wireless).

Perhaps when the memory bug is fixed we shall write a complete application for both iPhone and Blackberry, in the mean time, the browser works!

Over the past couple of days we have been working to update the core of the system, these changes have ranged from design to the actual chat system.

Design

We have been very minimal with the design to enable us to create applications for smaller media browsers such as iPhones, PSP’s and smaller screen resolutions.

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Chat System

Changes to the core of the system have been made to increase both speed and functionality of the system. During testing you may have noticed that after sending a message the client will lag until the message has been both sent and processed. To overcome this we now disable the textarea until the message has finished processing – this is hardly noticeable on good internet connections.

You may also have noticed that after clearing the database during testing you will receive ugly MySQL errors (normally mysql_fetch) – we have now “fixed” this problem, well we now order a correctly formatted system message, it’s not scary now.

Scrolling has also been integrated! When you send or receive a message the chat window will smoothly scroll down to show you the new message!

For security we are also starting to work on a report button which you can use to report the conversation if the other party has been rude or inappropriate.

Bugs

We cannot guarantee that the client will be bug free and at times we can guarantee that you will see errors. If you see any weird and confusing errors or weird alert messages, please tell us; either by commenting here or on our Facebook page.

If you have any suggestions please do tell us! We’d love to hear what you would like to see in Orlov!

Welcome to the development blog for Orlov, the anonymous chat system!

Keep an eye out for development on our system and features we’re adding as we go along. Follow the evolution of Orlov and remember to tell all of your friends!