A Monday in spring

[eve_prime]

We had a lovely dinner downtown – me, J, and D. DG was flying back from a Magic tournament in Minneapolis, and J interrupted his Monday evening Magic playing to pick him up at the airport, which would have gone better if another plane hadn’t been blocking the gate for half an hour. J’s next trip is to Berkeley at the end of the month. He’s thinking of driving, which would let him visit his aunt en route, but I think there’s a lot to be said for taking a plane. The drive is about 8 hours; the plane is 1.5 hours plus the time to drive to the airport, etc., in advance. If he drives they might charge him to park his car; if he takes the plane he can simply ride BART to his destination. We’ll see!

We’re still deciding if Discord is our best new tool for communication when we’re not in the same room. I looked up Slack, but the free version only archives messages for 90 days. Maybe we’ll consider Whatsapp, although I am not exactly fond of Meta.

Comments

[claidheamhmor]

WhatsApp is really good; literally everyone here uses it.

We got your letter, by the way - thank you!

[eve_prime]

Oh, you're welcome!

I'm going to ask you a bazillion questions about WhatsApp, since you're the only user I know! I assume it beeps if you get a message, so I won't ask about that. But...

One feature I'm liking about Discord is that we can create topical threads in our conversation. Does WhatsApp have anything like that? Is it easy to copy batches of messages or to download entire conversations? Does it retain the messages forever? If you send someone an image file, does it retain the quality of the images? Can you search for older mentions of words? Thanks in advance!

[claidheamhmor]

OK:

It doesn't support topical threads, as such; it's a lot like SMS. You can have groups, and communities of groups, but not topics within a single conversation (though you can reply individually to people).

You can copy batches or messages to test, and you can save an entire conversation to a text file, though the images are stored separately and not linked in.

It keeps messages forever, unless you delete them, or use an auto-delete on messages. I have messages going back a decade. Images are sent in "standard quality", but there is a setting to send in full quality instead, if you want to.

You can search conversations easily.

Obviously, tons of other features too - audio and video calls, live and static location, polls, events, AI images, etc. The chats, images, videos, and documents are all backed up to Google or to iCloud (for iPhones).

For notifications, you can set different sounds for different people and for groups or individuals, and you can mute people or groups (handy! I don't need to see notifications for every single message in some of our neighbourhood groups).

[eve_prime]

Wow, thanks for taking the time to tell me all that! I appreciate it, and I'll share it with J. It does sound useful!