I haven't written about Hotline Navigator since I first announced it, but the project hasn't been sitting idle. Over the past few days I've pushed out four releases, each one chipping away at rough edges and adding features that make the client feel more like a proper application and less like a proof of concept. If you tried v0.1.1 and bounced off it, now's a good time to give it another look.

Hotline Navigator banner

You can grab the latest release from the releases page. Builds are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux (ARM64) only at the time of writing this as my Linux VM died. Version 0.1.4 has a Linux x86_64 build, which doesn't have the UI polishes.

The big additions

@Mention notifications and watch words landed in v0.1.4. This existed in a earlier version but now has much more robust support. You can now get notified when someone mentions your name in chat, and if you want to track specific topics or mentions, you can add custom watch words in Settings that trigger the same notification. There's also a mute list if someone's being noisy. Pop-up toasts only appear when you're away from the tab, and everything gets logged to a notification history regardless.

News management and broadcast messages came in v0.1.3. If the server grants you the permissions, you can create news categories, folders, and articles directly in the client. Admins also get a broadcast button for server-wide messages. Admin names now show up in red in chat to mimic the original Hotline client.

Mobile-responsive UI and iOS builds were the focus of v0.1.2. The server UI now has a tab bar for Chat, Board, News, and Files on small screens, and there's a user list toggle with a live count badge. I also set up iOS build scripts and a GitHub Actions pipeline for iOS artifacts, it's not working yet but the groundwork is there. Whether that ever ships on the App Store is another question entirely. I'm not sure if it meets Apple's App Store guidelines for iOS apps, but it's there if you want to try it out.

Improvements and fixes

Here's an incomplete list of quality of life improvements:

  • Simple animations for modals.
  • Prefetching directories has now been removed as it caused more issues than it solved for file browsing. The performance gains came at the cost of unreliable behavior.
  • Chat input auto-resizes as you type, and the view only auto-scrolls when you're already at the bottom. No more getting yanked away from something you were reading.
  • Private messaging got a proper overhaul: text wraps, the input grows up to three lines, Enter sends, Shift+Enter adds a new line.
  • Links in News, Boards, Server Agreement, and Chat are now clickable.
  • Server agreements are now a proper modal. Previously you could just click around without agreeing.
  • File browser no longer hangs on empty folders, and there's a configurable download directory in Settings.
  • You can create folders in the file browser if the server allows it.
  • Server banners now fade in after loading, and there's a toggle to hide them entirely.
  • The icon picker got expanded with the full icon list, thanks to John over at the Hotline wiki.
  • Linux Icon fixes.

Under the hood

I've updated dependencies, either updated oradded ESLint, Vitest, and Rust-side tests with clippy warnings treated as errors. CI now gates on all of these before builds go out, it's completely broken as of writing this but I'll get it working eventually. The backend board parsing also got improvements for mixed UTF-8/Mac Roman content, which helps prevent garbled posts on older servers. Hotline's encoding situation is a perpetual adventure.

What's next

A few things on my radar: user name changes don't propagate without a disconnect/reconnect, which is annoying. Hotline hotline:// link support would be nice. The biggest nut to crack is the is chat persistence. Chat history is the big weak point of the Hotline protocol itself, there's no server-side scrollback, so once it's gone, it's gone. I'm still mulling over what, if anything, I can do about that client-side or contributing to Morbius server-side support for chat persistence without breaking compatibility with the original Hotline protocol. If chat persistence is implemented, it would start to make Hotline a viable Discord alternative for chatting.

Apple Media Archive

You can find my personal hotline server at hotline.semihosted.xyz. It's also listed in the remaining public trackers that I'm aware of. It has the Hotline Navigator client for download and a treasure trove of Apple media. It is only accessible via hotline.

If you want to follow along or contribute, the project is on GitHub. And if you're running a Hotline server and want to test, I'd love to hear how it works for you.