[Messaging] Show number of characters used and number of messages to send

[Daniel Holbach]

As many carriers charge per text message sent, it'd be nice to show how many characters were used for the message, so the sender knows how many sent text messages this boils down to.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

it's "fix commited" for ux component but where is the design document/recommendation?

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

Proposed implementation

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

design questions
Should we not show the number of messages until there is more than 1
if we will use MMS, should we replace the count with some text indicate such or the users may be confused why the count is not there, so rather than suppressing the text, replace with "Using MMS" or similar

[GTriderXC (gtriderxc)]

MMS? Perhaps it is gonna be off topic, perhaps it is the best moment to ask this qestion: how do we decide whether a message will be sent as SMS or MMS? I just send messages from my phone. Do You wanna tell me it sends messages as MMS? Sorry I do not send many messages and never even thought that we are able to send MMS. How do we know, decide and switch? This question may be a key to what Pat wrote. Does the phone choose the kind of a message by itself? I do not see a switcher or an option for MMS.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

Any message with an attachment will use MMS to do the transfer over the data connection. We also have an option under settings to enable it for group chat, otherwise the messages are sent separately. All other messages are SMS.

[GTriderXC (gtriderxc)]

If the app knows when a message should be a SMS or MMS it could perhaps change the amount of messages on the screen automatically between 160 for a sms and as I remember 1000 for a mms

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

The message count is not really the issue for MMS as its based on data usage billing.
The proposed implementation shows "MMS" when that is the case but no counts

[Paty Davila (dizzypaty)]

=== UX Comment ===

Agreed with the proposed solution. I recommend that we present the character counter string with the following format: “n(z)”; n= character count and z= number of SMS (e.g.: 56(1) —> 160(1) —> 161(2)). Because the suggested format seems a bit complex IMO and the most relevant info is the number of SMS rather than the character limit. The string can change to “MMS” when sending a message with attachments.

@raecontreras is working on a visual for the text size, position and alignment of the string in relation to the text field and she’ll post it here as soon as it’s ready.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

@paty thanks, I really need that today or this won't land in time

[Rae Shambrook (raecontreras)]

Attached is the approved visual design and spec

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

@rae thanks for the mockup, all the screenshots of other devices I looked at had it top and center, is there a reason you chose below and right? Also, I tried x-small and its frankly illegible on mx4 so sticking with just small if thats ok.

[Rae Shambrook (raecontreras)]

@pat-mcgowan I had seen some examples that had the counter bottom right, such as material design. In addition, we want the placement to fit in with our other patterns, which currently we do not use centre alignment. Another benefit of having the counter to the right is it's near the send button, so the user can more clearly keep track of their messages. As for x-small to small, that's fine.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package messaging-app - 0.1+16.10.20160819-0ubuntu1

---------------
messaging-app (0.1+16.10.20160819-0ubuntu1) yakkety; urgency=medium

  [ Devid Antonio Filoni ]
  * Preserve empty lines and leading spaces. (LP: #1366592)

  [ Pat McGowan ]
  * This adds support for showing the current character count and number
    of messages to be sent via SMS. It includes a new label on top of
    the text area showing number of characters / 160 (number of
    messages). It is shown once the message is over 1 line in length,
    per other systems. (LP: #1278790)

  [ Tiago Salem Herrmann ]
  * Share text only if there is no url in the content-hub transfer. (LP:
    #1613338)

 -- Tiago Salem Herrmann <email address hidden> Fri, 19 Aug 2016 15:15:35 +0000

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

It's 'Fix committed' but it don't see the counter with messaging-app 0.1+15.04.20160819-0ubuntu1
furthermore it doesn't address the case described in bug 1617961 where UCS-2 encoding is used instead of GSM 7-bit (when accentuated characters are used for instance) and limits the message to 70 chars. In this case I saw messages split in 5 chunks (and charged 5 times) when the original message contains accents and is less than 140 chars.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Ah, the counter has to be explicitly enabled which is not obvious at all. The second part of my comment still stands though.