Next weekend, June 13 and 14, the global TADHack takes place all over the world. You can participate on site or remotely, and there are a lot of different prizes to be won - in total the prize pot is worth $35k!
For the best two hacks using our technology, we will award a whole lot of Tessel modules! Tessel is a new breed of development board that runs entirely on Node.js, and they come with different modules you can plug in - for more information, see: getting started & sample projects.
Both prizes will include several tessel modules, including:
multiple core tessel boards
multiple servo modules and many servo motors
multiple ambient modules
multiple accelerometer modules
camera module
GPS module with antenna
microsd module
bluetooth module
audio module
climate module
relay module
RFID module
DIY module kit
Matrix.org will be present at the London site, Idea London in Shoreditch, where we will help both local and remote participants (via #matrix:matrix.org) using the Matrix APIs as part of their hacks.
So if you have some spare time next weekend - why not have a think about what could be a cool hack and join us for the global TADHack event! See you there!
We are back from Kamailio World, where we presented and participated in James Body's "Dangerous Demos". We were racing against the deadline, but managed to join the demos at the very last minute - and even win the award for "Most Entertaining Demo"!
It was great to catch up with old acquaintances - and meet many new ones! There were only around 150 people at Kamailio World, but given the area of expertise is very specialised, you can pretty much start talking to anyone and have a really interesting conversation.
A video from the dangerous demo event is available here:
The Parrot Drone we use in the demo has a 14 megapixel fisheye camera with advanced stabilization techniques which means that you can't actually see what happened when everybody went "ooh" - I assure you the "flip" command does exactly what you would expect!
Thanks to everybody who talked to us at Kamailio - and as always, come find us in the #matrix:matrix.org room on Matrix!
In our continuous journey around the world to promote Matrix, this week we have come to Kamailio World in Berlin, Germany. During the conference, there will be 5 technical workshops and 28 presentations about SIP, VoIP, WebRTC and other real time communication technologies - and Matthew will talk about Matrix at 11am on Friday.
I'm looking forward to lots of interesting talks (full schedule here), including an open discussion panel with Randy Resnick about real-time communications at 17:10 Thursday evening. Of course there will also be dangerous demos - and hopefully lots of people interested in Matrix! If you are going to the conference, please come and say hello - we will be exhibiting as well as presenting, and we will be there all day Thursday and Friday.
We have pushed out a new release of both Synapse, our reference server implementation, and matrix-angular-sdk, our reference webclient implementation!
The major new feature in Synapse is that you can now run Synapse backed by a PostgreSQL database. This increases performance and allows Synapse to scale much better! This, as well as various performance related bug fixes, should make things much snappier than before. Of course, you can still run SQLite; it's up to you what you want to use.
In the webclient you can now change or reset your password - we have had this feature requested a few times (although honestly I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned even more - maybe people are just better than me at remembering/managing their passwords) so this should be a welcome addition! We also fixed a memory leak in Angular, so again expect better performance!
Finally, we have done some work on improving the Application Service API, making it more reliable and secure. Please see the upgrade notes as well as the full changelog below.
Changes in Synapse v0.9.0:
General:
Add support for using a PostgreSQL database instead of SQLite. See postgres.rst for details.
Add password change and reset APIs. See Registration in the spec.
Fix memory leak due to not releasing stale notifiers - SYN-339.
Fix race in caches that occasionally caused some presence updates to be dropped - SYN-369.
Check server name has not changed on restart.
Add a sample systemd unit file and a logger configuration in contrib/systemd. Contributed Ivan Shapovalov.
Federation:
Add key distribution mechanisms for fetching public keys of unavailable remote home servers. See Retrieving Server Keys in the spec.
Configuration:
Add support for multiple config files.
Add support for dictionaries in config files.
Remove support for specifying config options on the command line, except for:
--daemonize - Daemonize the home server.
--manhole - Turn on the twisted telnet manhole service on the given port.
--database-path - The path to a sqlite database to use.
--verbose - The verbosity level.
--log-file - File to log to.
--log-config - Python logging config file.
--enable-registration - Enable registration for new users.
Application services:
Reliably retry sending of events from Synapse to application services, as per Application Services spec.
Application services can no longer register via the /register API, instead their configuration should be saved to a file and listed in the synapse app_service_config_files config option. The AS configuration file has the same format as the old /register request. See application_services.rst for more information.
Changes in Matrix Angular SDK 0.6.6:
Features:
Add password change and reset feature using v2_alpha APIs.
Bug fixes:
Fix memory leak caused by not removing a watcher on the root scope.
Matrix.org is happy to be sponsoring and talking at the WebRTC Conference and Expo in Miami, Florida, 12-14 May. Both Amandine and Matthew will be there - please come have a chat by booth #22! This is one of the longest running WebRTC Events, and Matthew is delivering one of the keynotes of the conference on Wednesday 4:00-4:30pm in room K-07.
Matthew will also participate in the "Open Source Options for WebRTC Development" session in room D2-02 at 9:50am on Wednesday (full agenda here).
Finally, Matrix will also be part of the WebRTC World Demos in room X-07 sometime between 4:30 and 7:30pm on Wednesday. Expect a dangerous demo!
Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who came to talk to us at SMR9 yesterday. SMR is a great way for developers looking for jobs and startups needing engineers to have a chat.
We had a very busy day with plenty of people interested in Matrix and eager to join the team. We received a lot of CVs and will get back to you - but in the meantime please check out our code and come say hi in the Matrix HQ room, using any of these Matrix clients!
If you missed SMR, or just generally is interested in working for Matrix.org - please feel free to send your CV to us - we need all kinds of developers, with skills ranging from backend and frontend to mobile development!
This week, Matrix is visiting San Francisco for Fluent, a web development conference over three days, with events ranging from 2-day training sessions to 10-min showcase presentations.
I had the opportunity to participate in the latter: Tuesday's Solutions Showcase in the Community Lounge. The presentation was recorded, here is the video and slides.
I also had a 30-min in-depth talk earlier today, where I went through a case study of adding Matrix to your existing app (slides). After evaluating options, we decided to use the flux-chat example by Facebook - it's a basic chat application that uses their internal message dispatcher and showcases how a React/Flux app works.
The code for the original example can be found here, and the complete diff of changes necessary to integrate it with Matrix - using the matrix-js-sdk - can be found here (thanks to Matthew for yet another late-night hack!). I think it's very cool to see how easily their chat example can be turned into a Matrix client, albeit a fairly basic one! Here is an online version if you want to try it out!
The original flux-chat and the Matrix-enabled flux-chat
If you have any questions or comments, we are still at Fluent - you can catch us in the exhibition hall in booth #208 - or virtually, as always, in #matrix:matrix.org!
Matrix had a speaker slot in both events; the first talk was "Proposing an open interoperable signalling layer for WebRTC" (slides).
As I was talking to people in the tea-breaks between sessions, I was actually surprised at the amount of people who not only knew about Matrix, but who had been following eagerly since the early days, and had questions about specific features and recent developments!
Later in the day it was time for the Kranky Geek, and the talk then was a bit more technical: "Interoperable HTTP Signalling with Matrix" (slides). The talk included a "dangerous demo" where we made a WebRTC call from our Matrix iOS App to our webclient for the first time - thanks to the OpenWebRTC team for helping us make the demo!
What's great about these kind of events is the feedback and discussion following talks; lots of people have relevant experiences and opinions that they are happy to share, and of course questions on how exactly different features actually work.
It's always great to meet new people and have lots of various discussions. Hopefully we have got a few more people interested in Matrix - we have already seen some new joiners in the #matrix:matrix.org room!
Next up is Fluent in San Francisco next week, where I will be speaking.
Just a quick announcement that Android Console 0.3.0 has been released on the Google Play store.
This release contains a whole lot of fixes, new features, and nicer UI - see the changes file for details, but in summary:
The UI has been switched to Android's Material Design
Android Lollipop is now fully supported
We have added support for contacts
Various accessibility and usability fixes have been contributed by Nolan Darilek (thanks!)
We also have clientside GCM support thanks to Leon Handreke! We need to make some changes server-side before GCM can be used, but that's on the current ToDo-list!
Lots of bugs fixed, as usual, thanks to everyone who reported an issue.
This weekend was spent at IDEA-London where the TADHack-mini London hackathon was going on. In total, there were around 18 different projects being hacked on all day Saturday and Sunday morning, before a 5-minute presentation on Sunday afternoon.
Four different projects used Matrix in one way or another: Matrixbot - a robot controlled through standard messages in a Matrix room - done by Scott Barstow and Anders Brownworth (project code and presentation video and picture). Neil Stratford's hack included lighting up his roll of LEDs whenever a push-notification hit his Matrix webclient (picture from the presentation).
The Co-Browsify hack by Žilvinas Račyla and Augustinas Bacvinka allows two people to browse the same webpage, with scrolling events being collected and duplicated to the other browser via Matrix (picture from the presentation). Finally, Matt Williams of Metaswitch created a Project Clearwater/Matrix Gateway which enables Project Clearwater/IMS to set up WebRTC calls with any matrix user (project code and pictures from the presentation) - this is the first time we have had a SIP-to-Matrix call (let alone IMS-to-Matrix) set up!
As TADHack sponsors, Matrix had two Parrot Drones to hand out as prizes, and the winners for best Matrix-related hacks are Matt Williams for the Clearwater/Matrix Gateway - and Scott Barstow and Anders Brownworth for Matrixbot! We are also happy that the other two Matrix-related projects were rewarded with prizes from the other sponsors (full list of winners).
All in all it was a very productive weekend, both in terms of tech and also meeting people. Thanks to everyone who participated and especially those who worked on Matrix-related hacks!
Next up is the WebRTC conference and its related Kranky Geek event - which will be happen tomorrow and the day after. See you there!
