[Galene] A few more words abot the native Android client for Galene

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

Hi,

As you may have seen, I've just released Galene 0.6.  There are no
user-visible changes in that version: it just tweaks the protocol so that
it's easier to evolve without breaking existing clients.  This was
motivated by me trying to write a native Android client.  Since most users
(myself included) prefer to use a web client in most cases, this deserves
some justification.

There are two distinct usage scenarios that are not currently met by the
web client:

  - screenshareing from an Android tablet; and
  - audio-only conferencing with the familiar telephone interface
    (volume rocker switch and speakerphone button).

In its current state, the Android application is ugly as sin but appears
to work satisfactorily well -- I just spent half an hour on the phone over
Galene, and the only noticeable difference with the normal phone
experience was the dramatically better audio quality.  (Galene encodes
audio using Opus at roughly 30kbit/s, while GSM and UMTS are limited to
AMR at up to 12kbit/s.)

The source code is not currently available (I'm only just learning Android
programming, and I'm not yet comfortable sharing my mistakes with the
world), but you may find a binary of my in-progress mistakes at

  https://galene.org/galene.apk

Please let me know if you'd like a copy of the protocol abstraction layer
(the Java equivalent of protocol.js).

-- Juliusz