EDIT: further to the exchanges that have gone on, I am not supporting the Meshtastic project any further. I am making the download unavailable now. I don't wish to further any involvement with the project.
OK, lots more stuff to announce with the V5 Ultra firmware. For quick bullet-point summary:
moving map pins
custom/private channel support
chat screen reading/scrolling improvements
message send re-tries
chat screen message states: waiting/confirmed/acknowledged
Moving Map Pins
The nodes you have 'Add to home' are now rendered in a lighter green, and move (if that node is moving, of course). You can also tap on these map pins to open up the direct chat screen.
Private Channel Support
The network profile menu now has two additional items:
For now, I'm just supporting up to 2 channels: primary and secondary. With either you can change the PSK, and set other options:
Entering the base64 PSK text is cumbersome, but cannot scan QR codes of course. You only need to do this once, so it's not so bad. NOTE: the base64 encoding of the PSK is found in the app, under Radio configuration > Channels, then tap on the private channel in the list.
Once you have enabled then entered the secondary channel details, then press ENTER, the home screen will then have an extra item with the name of this channel.
Chat Screen Improvements
The outbound messages are now marked with coloured rectangles, in three different colours: dark cyan = waiting for confirmation, cyan = confirmation received, orange = ACK received.
The orange 'ACK received' you will only see in the direct chat screens. As I mentioned in my previous post, these states are not persisted, so if you reboot the device the coloured indicators will not be there.
Also, under the hood, your messages will be resent up to three times, unless a confirmation or an ACK is received, in which case the retries will stop.
There are also readability improvements. For long messages, you can now read them by scrolling up to that message, and it will automatically be scrolled horizontally. Previously all long messages scrolled across at once, and I found that hard to read.
Misc.
I'm still not sure how direct chats are supposed to go over private channels. I am still designing the UI for this, for this firmware, but in the Meshtastic Android app I genuinely find the channels stuff confusing. :-(
There are still more to-dos, like TraceRoute support, and finer-grained sound/alert customisations.
If there is some feature you really want/need, just drop a comment here.
The new Beta 2 download is coming in next day or so. I'm actually not sure if this site lets me update an existing download, and if those of you who have already plonked down hard cash can just re-download(?) (At worse, you can always message me, and I'll email it to you.)
EDIT: Sound Preference
The alert sound can now sound just a single time, or on a loop. In the home screen context menu, the Sound setting can be: OFF, ON:single or ON:loop