This Week in Matrix 2018-12-07

Matrix Live S03E06

In which Matthew & Amandine discuss The Matrix.org Foundation, go-live for the French Government deployment for Matrix, and some exciting random diversions into post-1.0 Matrix features which should land once once 1.0 is out the door!

Purism sponsoring Fractal development

We are proudly sponsoring the work of Julian Sparber on Fractal, the @matrixdotorg client for GNOME. Read his latest update - https://t.co/q4ubjzETxC #LibreDesktop #DemandFreedom #gnome

— Purism (@Puri_sm) December 5, 2018

Purism announced they are sponsoring Fractal development, starting with Julian Sparber working last month to improve the message view. You can read about his progress here. Highlights:

Before, there was a jarring cut when new messages were loaded, but now you can just scroll upward and older messages are loaded continuously.
The part I'm most excited about is the new "new message divider". When the user opens a room they can directly start reading the conversation from the last seen message and they don't need to search for the new message divider. Not only has the UX gotten a lot better, but also the underlying code is much cleaner now.
I also spent some time on making message rendering faster. I replaced the RegExp with more efficient code, this made the rendering much faster (from ~10ms to ~ 1ms) for every single message.
In summary, all of these things improve Fractal's UX a lot and make it feel more like a modern messaging app.

Synapse 0.34.0rc1

0.34.0rc1 is out - please test it! 0.34.0 will be the first to officially support python 3. We're still working on the debian packaging but 0.34.0 proper should be out next week.

Dendrite

Brendan has been getting on with Dendrite development:

Started auditing Dendrite's codebase to identify what is left to implement, along with what hasn't been implemented correctly. Still a lot of work left to do on this, but it's looking promising so far.

Modular

Modular is a Hosted Homeservers product, check out modular.im. This week:

Matrix -> Matrix account migration tool available at https://www.modular.im/tools/matrix-migration. It's still beta, so please test it and let us know if you experience issues.

New Homeserver: linuxgaming.life

swedneck has set up a new public homeserver at linuxgaming.life! There is also a Riot installation at https://riot.linuxgaming.life, served via IPFS.

Currently working on the website (based on t2bot.io, thank you travis for making that available on github!) and making things nicer in general.
I will be adding more bots shortly. Please let me know of any issues with the HS or anything surrounding it.

Informo

Informo is a project to create a specification and implementation for distributing information and news. This week they have been working on merging changes to the specification:

Work on the Informo specifications has slowed down a bit in the last couple of weeks, though since the last update we did manage to get some relatively big SCSs merged into the specs, including SCS #9 (rendered here) which specifies how information sources must publish their information through the federation, and SCS #11 (rendered here) which describes how sources must register themselves in order to be picked up by clients, and handle localisation. ?
There's still a couple of big items to take care of before we can cut a 1.0 release of the Informo specs but this is definitely a huge step towards this goal.

Minecraft Bridge

Dandellion:

I started working on a Minecraft bridge pretty heavily based on Travis's old project, but using Minecraft-protocol instead of mineflayer.
You need a bot Minecraft account that can join and idle in the server, it then uses /tellraw to post messages.

libQMatrixClient 0.4.1 released

libQMatrixClient, which powers Spectral and Quaternion was released by kitsune, Lazy Loading coming soon:

libQMatrixClient 0.4.1 has been released today, with small fixes in the stable branch. Meanwhile, active work is ongoing on lazy-loading support in the library, with ETA for the feature landing in master being in about a week or so.

Riot Web

• Redesign progress: all resizeable sections are now persisted, (slow) progress on improving read markers
• Communities and community invitations should be more resilient to errors (on /develop only so far)

Riot iOS

• Reskin still ongoing
• A new release is coming
• Less activity because of POSS

Riot Android

• A new developer joined us to help maintaining Riot: Valere Fedronic
• Keys backup PR in review
• Privacy Terms acceptance in login flow in review
• FCM issue investigation/troubleshooting by Valere
• François Off (sick :()
• New theme is coming soon

Koma

druig has been working on Koma, a JavaFX Matrix client:

This week in koma: implementation of json library switched from runtime reflection to compile-time code generation
The matrix api is implemented manually in the project, retrofit and moshi are used to interact with the rest api.

SimpleMatrix

As we mentioned in TWIM last week, MTRNord has been working on designs for SimpleMatrix, a Matrix client for Android in development. This week he has made a video showcasing the new design.

Redecentralize meetup in London

Last night Half-Shot & Neil & Brendan went to see the Redecentralize folk at their meetup:

Beer! And pizza! And also Redecentralize
We chatted to a nice bunch of folks both demoing their decentralized projects and talked to the likes of scuttlebutt, BBC, IPFS and more. Was a interesting experience having around 8 minutes to quickly explain to newcomers what Matrix is and why they should use it in a speed dating format. We chatted (and demoed) bridges, new-riot and generally how it all fits together. There were a lot of very interesting people with different profiles and backgrounds, and diversified questions which lead to a lot of interesting discussions.

Note for the confused: the format of the meetup was comparable to speed dating. There is no suggestion that Matrix should be used at regular speed dating. If you do find such a use for Matrix, come tell us in #twim:matrix.org.

matrix-wug, X-SAMPA to IPA bot

Last month Dandellion introduced a bot designed to convert between formats for pronunciation notation, this week he released the source code: https://github.com/dali99/matrix-wug

The end of the post, and nearly the end of 2018

This week it has been winter-in-Europe kind of weather, but that's ok, it happens every year. TWIM on the other hand happens every week, so if you have something to share, and would like to share what you've been working on, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org.