This Week in Matrix 2019-01-04

Welcome to 2019

It's been 2019 for several days now, plenty of time to get used to it! Let's get started with the first TWIM of the year!

Matrix Live S3E09 from 35C3

Several Matrix-ers attended 35C3 in Leipzig last month, you can check out Matrix Live recorded from the conference below (also includes some screenshots and other clips of the event), and also watch a talk given by this author titled Matrix, the current status and year to date.

Welcoming Jason Robinson to New Vector

Decentralisation lover and Python fan Jason Robinson joins New Vector!

one of my dreams of working for a company that is a driver and leader in open source and open standards is coming true

matrix-appservice-purple

Hey Half-Shot, what bridges have you worked on this week?

matrix-appservice-purple got soft launched on matrix.org and is happily bridging XMPP and matrix communities together. I am on full bug and feature fixing duty for it and the consensus from both sides is that it's looking pretty awesome.
The matrix-appservice-purple bridge is coming along leaps and bounds, with formatting fixes, presence handling and speedier message delivery both ways. Also a shoutout to the XMPP community for guidling me through the XEP landscape and giving the bridge a thorough testing. :)

Riot Web Experimental

Riot Web Experimental was announced in a blog post last month, and is ready to get some more testing! Note that the name is still "experimental", but to get an image of where things are going, please give it a try!

http://riot.im/experimental

Riot iOS

Photo sharing via the app share extension has been fixed this week.
At the time of writing, a new Riot iOS is baking with all bug fixes made the last month.

Riot Android

Riot 0.8.21 has been released on 01/02 on the PlayStore and on F-Droid.

This version contains:

• A new notification troubleshoot screen with the possibility to run a diagnostic and to submit bug report. Feedbacks are already coming and we improve this screen incrementally to help users.
• A new invitations counter on the group icon in the home screen
• Other bug fixes

We are still working on push/notification reliability. Riot Play Store resources have been translated into 8 languages so far: Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Hungarian, Italian and Portuguese (Brazil).

matrix-client.el's many updates

alphapapa provided many updates for matrix-client.el this week, I recommend chatting in #matrix-client.el:matrix.org where the cultists Emacs users and client devs hang out.

matrix-client.el gained more room sorting options and a /priority command to set room priority. It also includes a workaround for a Google Chrome drag-and-drop bug on Linux, so now Chrome users can drag-and-drop URLs, files, and images directly into room buffers to upload them.

matrix-client.el gained a new notifications-buffer feature that shows notifications from multiple rooms in a single list, allowing you to easily monitor multiple rooms at once and jump to events in them.
e.g. I can see messages from #matrix and #twim in the same window, and reply to messages in both rooms from the same prompt

koma project: now continuum-desktop (client) and koma library

uforia from koma announced that the client formerly known as koma is now continuum-desktop:

in the koma project, the desktop client now has continuous integration and prebuilt packages for Mac and Linux; and you can click on image messages to zoom in. A simple weather bot is created reusing the same implementation of matrix client api. Send it the name of a city, and it will fetch the current weather using openweathermap

mxisd

Max, creator of mxisd, announced:

All versions of mxisd dropped support for Riot v0.17.8, introducing a bug affecting many of its features. Any new release integrating this PR will also be dropped of support. mxisd users are strongly encouraged to roll back to v0.17.7

This design concern is noted by the riot-web team and is under investigation.

Dendrite audit progress

Brendan on the progress of the Dendrite audit:

Dendrite's audit is finally coming to an end! I'm happy to say I just finished the “data collection” phase, in which I looked at everything that needs to be either fixed or implemented in Dendrite. This represents 90% of the work and around 3 weeks of full-time work. All that's left to do now is some triaging in the data (which is available here, by the way), into order to have a clear view on what's left to do in the audit. Expect a lot of new issues and a shiny project board appearing on the Dendrite repository next week ?

Informo news

Informo is a project intended to enable information sharing, especially for vulnerable activists. It is enabled by Matrix. vabd, the mystery individual behind the project announced:

Our specs bot, which shouts in Matrix rooms when the state of a proposal to a specs project changes, got an upgrade: it now handles concurrency better, and can now send multiple messages if multiple matching labels are added to the proposal in the same action (before, it just wouldn't know what to do in such an event and would fail silently).

msc-chatbot

The MSC process is the formal process by which changes are submitted to become part of the Matrix specification. anoa has been working on a bot to help with the process:

msc-chatbot now exists. It has commands that let you view the status of current MSCs, as well as a daily summary of MSCs to keep people up to date.

Matrix-Minecraft bridge

TravisR, as if he has time to be working on such things, has announced the revival of his Matrix-Minecraft bridge:

I've brought my Matrix<-->Minecraft bridge back to life in the form of a Bukkit plugin. It's still in the very early stages of development and requires you to compile it yourself to get it, but it is a thing. Check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-minecraft
It'll be designed to work as a public hosted bridge, so someone could use t2bot.io to bridge their minecraft server (for example)

stickerpack dimension migration tool

Dandellion has created a tool for stickerpack creators:

I've finished https://dali99.github.io/stickerpack-dimension-migration-tool/ for a niceish way to make migrations files for custom stickerpacks in dimension

XMPP (as Jabber) turns 20

As noted in The XMPP Newsletter:

Today is Jabber's 20th anniversary! Jabber would later be standardized and renamed to XMPP.

On this subject, it's always worth thinking about the importance of openness and interoperability in messaging. This recent article in Linux Journal is a reminder of the need to avoid proprietary vendor lock in, and mentions both XMPP and Matrix.

We'll meet again…

Come chat in #twim:matrix.org with your Matrix news to be featured in this post. Next Friday there will be another weekly edition, but before then expect to see an edition to the effect "benpa's best-of-the-community 2018".