Sometimes I don’t know what to think of App.net and Patter and the whole fragmentation of feature sets and implementation styles or the incomplete mess some clients offer. Patter is a perfect example for that: Started as a website it offered the creation of chat rooms. You could create public rooms for a specific topic and private rooms. Public rooms could be used by everyone, private rooms only after adding the username to the room. Since you can easily add and remove persons to and from a private room it’s a nice alternative to “official” private messages of App.net (or Apples iMessage), where you cannot change the recipients after having started a discussion.
But after months coming and going there is little progress and there is no client to “get it all”. Look at iOS: We have beautiful clients like Riposte and Felix with more or less no Patter support at all. BUT we have a full featured official app - besides that it’s missing image posting and looks like it was created for iPhone OS 1…
Or take OS X, where Kiwi still does not support images in private messages at all! (Don’t even think about Patter there.) Out of nowhere came a Wedge update a few days ago. It adds complete private message support and public and private patter rooms, but does. Not ↗. Support. Images! And it displays Patter rooms in a way that you can not differentiate between private messages and Patter rooms with the same persons:
Why does that matter? Because more clients support private messages than Patter. Reply in the wrong channel and no one receives your post in the client they have available…
It should be easy: Private messages to single and multiple recipients, public Patter Rooms, private Patter rooms, support for attached images.
But it’s not. Every client comes with its own feature set. Some are ugly and offer much functionality, some are beautiful and offer a minor set of functionality and some pick some features and you don’t understand why. Look for yourself:
Patter website
The Patter website is built as a Javascript client for the App.net website. In fact, to built Patter, no stuff is stored on the Patter website. It’s everything in App.net. Nice!
Features:
- Lobby (list of rooms)
- Subscribe to rooms
- Read/answer/create private messages (single recipient)
- Read/answer/create private messages (multiple recipients)
- Read/answer in/create private Patter rooms
- Read/answer in/create public Patter rooms
- Broadcast (post a text in the patter room and crosspost it to the App.net stream)
- View images
Patter iOS app
Cannot post images, but shows them. Image posting will come in an update though.
Features:
- Lobby (list of rooms)
- Subscribe to rooms
- Read/answer/create private messages (single recipient)
- Read/answer/create private messages (multiple recipients)
- Read/answer in/create private Patter rooms
- Read/answer in/create public Patter rooms
- Broadcast (post a text in the patter room and crosspost it to the App.net stream)
- View images
hAppy iOS app
Well. It gets more beautiful with the new themes :). And guess what: The themes are exchanged in a public Patter room! They are just normal posts with an image attached to the post and a bit of metadata added with the theme colors. Every client can show the post, many clients the image and hAppy also looks at the metadata and uses it to change the colors. That’s one nice way to built your own features on top of what App.net offers! But it lacks a list of Patter rooms and you cannot subscribe to a room.
Features:
- Read/answer/create private messages (single recipient)
- Read/answer/create private messages (multiple recipients)
- Read/answer in private Patter rooms
- Read/answer in public Patter rooms
- View/post images
Wedge Mac app
Okay, it was updated with Patter support just a few days ago and as mentioned in the intro has some issues. Like in hAppy you cannot search or subscribe, but you can use the rooms which you subscribed for in other apps. Image support is missing. Completely. If your drag an image it will paste the local file system path. Bummer.
Features:
- Read/answer/create private messages (single recipient)
- Read/answer/create private messages (multiple recipients)
- Read/answer in private Patter rooms
- Read/answer in public Patter rooms
Note: After posting the initial version of this article the daily Wedge update arrived and removed Patter support or, to be more precise, hid it in the settings under “Behavior/Configure additional channel types”, where you have to add “net.patter-app.room”.
Felix iOS app
Don’t know what’s happening here, because it offers private Patter rooms, but no public rooms. At least it supports images.
Features:
- Read/answer/create private messages (single recipient)
- Read/answer/create private messages (multiple recipients)
- Read/answer in/create private Patter rooms
- View/post images
Riposte iOS app
No Patter at all, but complete support for private messages.
Features:
- Read/answer/create private messages (single recipient)
- Read/answer/create private messages (multiple recipients)
- View/post images
Whisper iOS app
A client only for private messages! But should not private Patter rooms be part of this feature set? From my perspective, I use private messages to talk to people and private Patter rooms to talk about specific topics where the people can change. Whisper should support both.
Features:
- Read/answer/create private messages (single recipient)
- Read/answer/create private messages (multiple recipients)
- View/post images
Kiwi Mac app
Kiwi is strange. It started with a decent feature set and then nothing happened. It still does not support images in private messages and you cannot create a new private message to multiple recipients. Patter support is missing completely.
Features:
- Read/answer/create private messages (single recipient)
- Read/answer private messages (multiple recipients)
And don’t get me started talking about non-image-attachments like audio files, which EVERY iOS app could support directly because the OS supports them. Out. Of. The. Box. Instead you don’t even get a hint that there’s an attachment hidden in the post which the client does not support. Great stuff.