Welcome to JMP.chat ! If you are looking for a simple guide on how to sign up for JMP, then you have come to the right place! We will be keeping this guide up-to-date if there is ever a change in how to sign up.

We will first start with signing up from within your Jabber chat application on mobile, where you will never need to leave the client to get set up. I will be using the freedomware Android client Cheogram to do this signup. To start us off, we will need to create a Jabber ID (or “JID”). Upon first opening the app you will be presented with a welcome screen where you can choose to signup using the built-in flow for conversations.im or chatterboxtown.us, or you can choose your own custom server.

We will choose chatterboxtown.us for the purposes of this guide, but you are definitely free to choose whatever service you like, or bring your own! On the first screen of the server signup it will ask you to enter a username; this can be anything you want as long as it isn’t already in use on the server. After tapping Next, it will ask you to create a password for this account; length does not seem to be limited so create one as long as you want. Do not forget it, or use a password manager to create/store the password! Tapping Next again will log you in and offer to set an avatar for your account, you can set one now or choose to do so at a later time, if at all. Once logged in to the new account, Cheogram will ask for permissions to your contacts, you can accept or deny them. Accepting will allow us to implement the integration, which we will explain at the end of this post.

Now the fun begins! First we will need to add the Cheogram bot as a contact before communicating with it. To do this tap the “chat” bubble icon in the lower right corner, it will change views as well as change to a “+” sign, tap it again, then tap “Add contact”. A dialog box will appear where you can type in a contact’s “Jabber ID”, here you will want to put cheogram.com and tap Add, it will provide a prompt saying that it “appears to be a domain”, so tap “add anyway” and then it will open the screen for the bot.

From here you will get to see one of the features of the Cheogram app, the Command UI! When a chat first opens you will notice that a “tab” near the top will appear titled “Commands”; it is from within this tab that you can manage all the features and settings of your JMP account, but first we need to register an account, and you will notice there is only one command available right now, “register with backend”. You will want to tap this “register” command, and it will take you to the next step. Here you will choose the backend SGX you are wanting to use; this list includes the most popular community ones as well, but we need to select the JMP option. The next screen will ask you to enter a search term for selecting a number; this can be by area code, state/province, city&state/province, or lead with the tilde “~” character to indicate a vanity pattern. We have chosen areacode 902 which then shows us a list of numbers on the next screen; choose one and tap Next.

On the following screen it will ask you how you wish to activate your account; you have four options: Credit Card, Invite Code, Bitcoin, and Mail or Interac e-Transfer, as well as what the base currency is that you want to use. For this tutorial we have chosen credit card and Canadian dollars. Tapping Next will give us a page rendered in-app where you can add a credit card to use for activation, and choose the amount of funds that will be auto-charged to your credit card when your balance drops below $5. If you clear this box before tapping save, it will disable the auto top-up feature on your account, tapping Next will finish the sign up process. You can now open the Commands tab again and check out the new commands available for your account; details on these commands will come in a seperate blog post.

Now that you have activated your account you are able to call (who really does this anymore, seriously? ;) ), SMS or MMS with your contacts. To add a contact within Cheogram is quite easy with the contacts integration. Now that the bot has been added to your account contacts, your device’s contacts should already be visible when you tap on the “chat” icon to start a new chat, or you can do the following to add a contact to your Jabber server. First tap the chat icon again like you did earlier to add the bot, tap the “+”, then “add contact”. The first thing you should notice that is different this time with the dialog box that pops up is that it now has two selectable buttons: Jabber ID, and PSTN. The PSTN option makes adding telephone numbers for calling or sending SMS to very easy, just type out the phone number you wish to add to your contacts and then tap ADD. This will automatically format the phone number according to the locale detected on your device. If you need to add an international number, you will need to add the phone in the full international format to override the country code being automatically added. With the contact now added, you can either start typing out a message, or tap the “phone” icon that appears at the top to make an audio call to the contact. Images, videos and audio files can also be sent using a number from JMP.

Another helpful feature of the Cheogram app is native dialer integration. This allows you to make phone calls straight from your dialer just like any other phone call. To enable this, tap on the 3-dot menu in the top right of the main Cheogram screen, and then tap on Manage Accounts. Here you should see a new option under your account(s) that says “Manage Phone Accounts”, tap on that title and it will take you to a system settings page where you can enable your Jabber ID to make and receive calls, tap the toggle next to the account you want to enable. Now go back to your Manage Accounts screen in Cheogram and then tap the “gear” icon and from this second system settings page, you can select which “calling account” is your default, or to require it to always ask what account you want to use. Do note that there is currently a known bug in Android where this setting will reset after every reboot of the device, there currenltly is no fix out and Google says it will be fixed in a later release version of Android.