by Kegan Dougal | Apr 22, 2015 | General, Tech |
This post has now been edited into a guide – you can find the source in github, and the formatted guide on the matrix.org website!
Like a lot of open source projects, we use IRC a lot. Naturally, we also use Matrix to communicate with each other. For some time now we’ve had an IRC bot sitting on specific channels to “bridge” together IRC and Matrix. This bot simply sent IRC messages when it received Matrix messages and vice versa. As we started to rely on it more and more though, we realised that there were things that were impossible for simple client-side bots to do by themselves. This spurred the development of Application Services which I introduced in my previous post. In this blog post, I want to outline some of the features and techniques of the IRC application service which we’ve been working on over the past few weeks.
Features:
- Specific channel-to-matrix room bridging : This is what the original IRC bot did. You can specify specific channels and specific room IDs, and messages will be bridged.
- Dynamic channel-to-matrix room bridging : This allows Matrix users to join any channel on an IRC network, rather than being forced to use one of the specific channels configured.
- Two-way PM support : IRC users can PM the virtual “M-” users and private Matrix rooms will be created. Likewise, Matrix users can invite the virtual “@irc_Nick:domain” user IDs to a room and a PM to the IRC nick will be made.
- IRC nick changing support : Matrix users are no longer forced to use “M-” nicks and can change them by sending “!nick” messages directly to the bridge.
- Ident support : This allows usernames to be authenticated for virtual IRC clients, which means IRC bans can be targeted at the Matrix user rather than the entire application service.
The use of the Application Services API means:
- The bot can reserve user IDs. This prevents humans from registering for @irc_… user IDs which would then clash with the operation of the bot.
- The bot can reserve room aliases. This prevents humans from register for #irc_… aliases which would then clash with the operation of the bot.
- The bot can trivially manage hundreds of users. Events are pushed to the application service directly. If you tried to do this as a client-side bot, you would need one event stream connection per virtual user.
- The bot can lazily create rooms on demand. This means Matrix users can join non-existent room aliases and have the application service quickly track an IRC channel and create a room with that alias, allowing the join request to succeed.
Implementation details:
- Written in Node.js, designed to be run using
forever.
- Built on the generic matrix-appservice-node framework.
- Supports sending metrics in statsd format.
- Uses matrix-appservice-node to provide a standardised interface when writing application services, rather than an explicit web framework (though under the hood matrix-appservice-node is using Express).
At present, the IRC application service is in beta, and is being run on #matrix and #matrix-dev. If you want to give it a go, check it out on Github – it is not currently released on npm. N.B. it requires features from the develop branch of synapse; either run your own synapse off the develop branch or wait a few days for us to release Synapse 0.9.0.
Needless to say, we look forward to this being the first of many full network<->network bridges into Matrix – come chat on #matrix:matrix.org if you’d like to write or run your own! Next up is Lync and XMPP…
by Oddvar Lovaas | Apr 13, 2015 | In the News, Tech |
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.
by Matthew Hodgson | Apr 10, 2015 | Events, General, Tech |
As of 9am tomorrow, somewhere in the depths of East London (and remotely from around the world), a diaspora of elite VoIP/WebRTC/Telco developers will compete to build the most innovative and impressive communications demos at Tadhack Mini London! Dave, Oddvar and myself are going to be there from the core Matrix.org team, both on-site and online (at #matrix:matrix.org, of course) to provide support – especially to everyone who’s using Matrix APIs in their solution. And as we mentioned before, we’ll even be giving away two Parrot Bebop Drones to the best hacks built using Matrix!
It’s not too late to get involved – the more the merrier. We reckon it’s going to be a really fun weekend, so look forward to chatting to some of you soon!
by Matthew Hodgson | Mar 12, 2015 | General, In the News, Tech, Uncategorized |
Hi folks,
As of today you can install the basic reference Matrix client on iOS from the App Store. We’ve called the app “Matrix Console” to try to make it clear that it’s very much a developer/poweruser tool for experimenting with Matrix and showcasing the Matrix APIs and an example of how to use the iOS SDK – whilst it can be used as a great replacement to IRC, it’s by no means meant to be a glossy polished app like Hangouts or Slack.
Meanwhile you can also get the Android version of Console at the Google Play Store as we mentioned in the last post.
Needless to say, they’re both entirely open-source (Apache license) and you can grab the code from https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk respectively if you want to play with your own copy.
The mobile apps currently act very similarly to the reference web app – providing group chat (text/images/video etc) in decentralised public and private rooms, with room history kept in sync across all your different Matrix-enabled apps. They don’t yet do VoIP, although we’re working on it. Please give the apps a go and file all your bugs and feedback into JIRA or #ios:matrix.org and #android:matrix.org so we can make them even better :)
The iOS app in particular showcases one of the coolest new features in Matrix: the ability for homeservers to support highly configurable push notifications, ensuring you never miss messages on Matrix ever again. The way this works is that when you install the Matrix Console app from iTunes and log in, the app tells your homeserver to send push notifications to a simple push server on Matrix.org running the sygnal codebase (you can also run your own sygnal for your own Matrix apps). You can then configure some excitingly comprehensive push settings in the settings page of the web client (we haven’t exposed the UI to configure these on the mobile apps yet) to configure what events in Matrix should trigger push notifications – and then you will automatically receive the desired pushes even when the app isn’t running.
We think this is incredibly powerful: there are no longer *any* client-side notification settings. Instead, all your notifications are stored server-side – per-room, per-user, per-word and as many other extensible rules as you desire (plus some helpful common special cases). This means that the rules that determine whether you see notifications on the desktop from the webclient are *identical* to the notifications you receive push notifications on your mobile devices. We hope this is a huge improvement over the inflexible notification rules that iMessage, Hangouts etc push onto you (so to speak).
To support the new push rules we’ve just released a new version of the web client – 0.6.5. This implements the new rule configuration UI – see below for example UI.
The full list of changes in matrix-angular-sdk 0.6.5 is as per below. We hope you enjoy the new clients and push settings – thanks for flying Matrix :)
Changes in Matrix Angular SDK 0.6.5 (2015-03-12)
================================================
Features:
- Push notifications can now be set up in the Settings page.
- Text entered into the input box for a room will be preserved across
room swaps.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed a bug where auto-scroll for images did not work correctly.
- Fixed a bug which resulted in a partially populated room when another
device joined a room.
- Fixed a bug which prevented files with the same name being uploaded
sequentially.
- Correctly remove redacted event text from the recent activity list.
- Firefox: Can now join rooms which have a double ## alias.
Improvements:
- Modified Settings page layout.
- Angular SDK now relies on the Javascript SDK for new API features.
- Transparent images will now be shown on a white background.
- GIFs are now marked as such on the thumbnail for the image.
- The web client version is now shown in Settings.
by Matthew Hodgson | Mar 10, 2015 | General, Tech |
Hi folks,
We released a new version (0.2.3) of the Android Matrix Console application today – this is a decent upgrade over 0.2.2. Changelog below.
If you’re an Android user, please install the app from the Play Store and give it a go and give us some feedback on #android:matrix.org or Google Play.
thanks!
Changes in Matrix Android SDK in 0.2.3 (2015-03-10)
===================================================
-----
SDK
-----
-----------------
Matrix Console
-----------------
Improvements:
* Avoid refreshing the home page when it is not displayed.
* Display a piechart while uploading a media.
* Refresh the display when some messages are automatically resent (after retrieving a data network connection for example).
* Update the user rename message to be compliant with the web client.
* Use the local media files instead of downloading them when they are acknowledged (messages sending).
* Create a medias management class.
* Display the offline status in the members list.
* Avoid creating new homeActivity instance when joining a room from member details sheet.
* The public rooms list are now saved in the bundle state : it should avoid having a spinner when rotated the device.
* The animated GIFs are now supported.
Features:
* Add the rate limits error management. The server could request to delay the messages sending because they were too many messages sent in a short time (to avoid spam).
* Can take a photo to send it.
* A chat room page is automatically paginated to fill. It used to get only the ten latest messages : it displayed half filled page on tablet.
* Add the sending failure reason in the message details (long tap on a message, “Message details”).
* The user is not anymore notified it the push rules are not fulfilled.
* Add some room settings (Display all events, hide unsupported events, sort members by last seen time, display left members, display public rooms in the home page).
* Add various accessibility tweaks.
Bug fixes:
* The media downloads/uploads were sometimes stuck.
* The private room creation was broken.
* SYAND-33 : number of unread messages disappears when entering another room.
* The RoomActivity creation used to crash when it was cancelled because the Room id param was not provided.
* The client used to crash when the home server was invalid but started with http.
* The account creation used to fail if the home server had a trailing slash.
* SYAND-44 In progress text entry could be saved across crashes.
* SYAND-38 Inline image viewer in Android app.
by Matthew Hodgson | Mar 9, 2015 | General, Tech, Tutorials |
Hi all,
What with the chaos of Mobile World Congress last week we seem to have been hoarding releases – so here’s what’s been happening!
Synapse 0.8.0 was released this afternoon. This is a major performance/stability release, with lots of good stuff going on – especially adding more customisable push notification support APIs for iOS/Android; support for registering accounts from mobile devices; extensions to the new Application Service API and lots of federation improvements and bug fixes. Please upgrade at your earliest convenience.
Meanwhile, we quietly released the Matrix Console Android example app to the Google Play last week, alongside v0.2.2 of the Android SDK – release notes below. There’ll be a new version of the Android Console app out tomorrow, but mentioning here for completeness and to share the release notes. Also, the iOS SDK is now on v0.3.1, with lots of performance and usability improvements.
Finally, we have a whole new official Matrix client SDK for JavaScript, all packaged up ready for use by Node developers and JS purists alike as an NPM with minimal dependencies. Meanwhile, the matrix-angular-sdk has been switched to use matrix-js-sdk from now on. You can use the plain JS API with a npm install matrix-js-sdk and then:
var sdk = require("matrix-js-sdk");
var client = sdk.createClient("https://matrix.org");
client.publicRooms(function(err, data) {
console.log("Public Rooms: %s", JSON.stringify(data));
});
Meanwhile, release notes for all & sundry lie below.
Changes in synapse v0.8.0 (2015-03-06)
======================================
General:
* Add support for registration fallback. This is a page hosted on the server
which allows a user to register for an account, regardless of what client
they are using (e.g. mobile devices).
* Added new default push rules and made them configurable by clients:
* Suppress all notice messages.
* Notify when invited to a new room.
* Notify for messages that don't match any rule.
* Notify on incoming call.
Federation:
* Added per host server side rate-limiting of incoming federation requests.
* Added a ``/get_missing_events/`` API to federation to reduce number of
``/events/`` requests.
Configuration:
* Added configuration option to disable registration:
``disable_registration``.
* Added configuration option to change soft limit of number of open file
descriptors: ``soft_file_limit``.
* Make ``tls_private_key_path`` optional when running with ``no_tls``.
Application services:
* Application services can now poll on the CS API ``/events`` for their events,
by providing their application service ``access_token``.
* Added exclusive namespace support to application services API.
Changes in Matrix Android SDK in 0.2.2 (2015-02-27)
===============================================
-----
SDK
-----
-----------------
Matrix Console
-----------------
Improvements:
* Exif management : the uploaded image is rotated according to the exif metadata
(if the device has enough free memory).
* Add a piechart while downloading an image
* Add JSON representation of a message (tap on its row, “Message details”
* The public rooms list is now sorted according to the number of members.
Features:
* Add configuration and skeleton classes for receiving GCM messages
* Add REST client for pushers API with add method for HTTP pushers.
* Add the account creation.
Bug fixes:
* Reset the image thumbnail when a row is reused.
* SYAND-30 Notification should be away when entering a room.
* Some images thumbnails were downloaded several times.
* Restore the foreground service
* The medias cache was not cleared after logging out.
* The client crashed when joining #anime:matrix.org.
* SYAND-29 Messages in delivery status are not seen
* Some user display names were their matrix IDs.
* The room name/ topic were invalid when inviting to a room.
Changes in Matrix iOS SDK in 0.3.1 (2015-03-03)
===============================================
-----
SDK
-----
Improvements:
* Improved push notifications documentation.
* MXSession: Slightly randomise reconnection times by up to 3s to prevent all
Matrix clients from retrying requests to the homeserver at the same time.
* Improved logs
Bug fixes:
* SYIOS-90 - iOS can receive & display messages multiple times when on bad connections
-----------------
Matrix Console
-----------------
Improvements:
* Fixed warnings with 64bits builds.
* Room history: Improve scrolling handling when keyboard appears.
* Contacts: Prompt user when local contacts tab is selected if constact sync is disabled.
Bug fixes:
* Fix crash when switching rooms while the event stream is resuming.
* SYIOS-69 - On Screen Keyboard can end up hiding the most recent messages in a room.
* SYIOS-98 - Crash when attempting to attach image on iPad
Changes in Matrix iOS SDK in 0.3.0 (2015-02-23)
===============================================
-----
SDK
-----
Breaks:
* [MXSession initWithMatrixRestClient: andStore: ] and the onStoreDataReady argument in
[MXSession start:] has been removed. The SDK client can now use the asynchronous
[MXSession setStore:] method to define a store and getting notified when the SDK can
read cached data from it. (SYIOS-62)
* MXStore implementations must now implement [MXStore openWithCredentials].
* All MXRestClient methods now return MXHTTPOperation objects.
Improvements:
* Created the MXSession.notificationCenter component: it indicates when an event must be
notified to the user according to user's push rules settings.
* MXFileStore: Improved loading performance by 8x.
* Added an option (MXSession.loadPresenceBeforeCompletingSessionStart) to refresh presence
data in background when starting a session.
* Created MXLogger to redirect NSLog to file and to log crashes or uncaught exception.
* MXRestClient: Added [MXRestClient registerFallback].
* Logs: Make all NSLog calls follows the same format.
Features:
* SYIOS-40 - Any HTTP request can fail due to rate-limiting on the server, and need to be retried.
* SYIOS-81 - Ability to send messages in the background.
Bug fixes:
* SYIOS-67 - We should synthesise identicons for users with no avatar.
* MXSession: Fixed crash when closing the MXSession before the end of initial Sync.
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