Hi everyone,

Just a quick heads up that we'll be attending Mobile World Congress (Mar 2-5) this year, chatting to the telco community about how they can benefit from Matrix; encouraging companies to build gateways, servers and clients and generally trying to grow the Matrix ecosystem. If you're going to be there and are interested in finding out more, please mail us (matrix at matrix.org) to arrange a meeting - we'll be hanging out at the OpenMarket (8.1D113) and the Amdocs (3G10) booths.

Thanks!

Hi all,

We released Synapse 0.7.1 this morning - This release includes more critical federation stability and performance updates - please upgrade as soon as you can!. You can get the code and installation instructions from http://github.com/matrix-org/synapse as normal.

Update: You can also install and run Synapse now via Docker, thanks to a Dockerfile at https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/silviof/docker-matrix/ contributed today by Silvio Fricke. Thanks Silvio!!

Other than the federation improvements, the big new feature that lands here is the long-awaited Application Service API. This is a set of simple extensions to the Client-Server API to make it much easier to build powerful gateways and other application logic on top of Matrix. You can think of it being somewhere between IRC Services, IMS application services and XMPP components - but with the simplicity of an IRC bot. The extensions let you register application services as privileged Matrix clients, and create virtual users and virtual rooms in bulk within Matrix (e.g. bridging an entire IRC network into Matrix). The API also lets your application service receive inbound events as HTTP pushes rather than having to poll. The end result is that it's suddenly become a lot easier to bridge existing communities with Matrix!

We'll post another blog post shortly to give a lot more information; in the interim you can read more about it in the newly updated spec at http://matrix.org/docs/spec/#application-service-api.

Changes in synapse v0.7.1 (2015-02-19)
======================================


Initial alpha implementation of parts of the Application Services API.
Including:

AS Registration / Unregistration
User Query API
Room Alias Query API
Push transport for receiving events.
User/Alias namespace admin control



Add cache when fetching events from remote servers to stop repeatedly
fetching events with bad signatures.


Respect the per remote server retry scheme when fetching both events and
server keys to reduce the number of times we send requests to dead servers.


Inform remote servers when the local server fails to handle a received event.


Turn off python bytecode generation due to problems experienced when
upgrading from previous versions.

We just pushed out a major new release of Synapse 0.7.0, the python reference server for Matrix, and a minor maintenance update for matrix-angular-sdk 0.6.2, the reference web client implementation.

The emphasis here has been on federation performance and stability - with all the recent interest from FOSDEM and LWN and HackerNews we've been getting a lot of traffic on matrix.org and new servers federating up, so we've been busy profiling and fixing performance on some of the hot paths by adding in-memory caches and similar.

This release is highly recommended if you are running a federated server, as it fixes many denial-of-service failure modes in the federation implementation, as well as many performance improvements

Behind the scenes, there's also lots of work going on for v2 of the Client-Server API (which lets you filter the events your client subscribes to in a room, and combines the 'initial sync' and 'eventstream' APIs into a single simplified '/sync' API) - the alpha of this has landed in 0.7.0, but we don't recommend trying to use it yet. Meanwhile the Application Service API is effectively finished, but hasn't landed on the master branch yet. Synapse also finally has initial support for push notifications for the iOS client now via the sygnal APNS gateway, although we need to actually document how to set this up to be usable in general.

Finally, we have switched to recommending that synapse is installed in a virtualenv rather than into ~/.local, due to various problems with how setup.py's dependency management works. Instructions on setting up a virtualenv can be found in the README.

On the clientside: we've improved performance, enabled identicons for unknown users, and now fully support OpenWebRTC for VoIP calling from Safari, Bowser, and other OpenWebRTC-capable browsers!

Thanks to everyone running servers - please upgrade, tell your friends, and help us grow Matrix!

Changes in synapse v0.7.0 (2015-02-12)
======================================

* Add initial implementation of the query auth federation API, allowing
  servers to agree on whether an event should be allowed or rejected.
* Persist events we have rejected from federation, fixing the bug where
  servers would keep requesting the same events.
* Various federation performance improvements, including:
  - Add in memory caches on queries such as:
     * Computing the state of a room at a point in time, used for
       authorization on federation requests.
     * Fetching events from the database.
     * User's room membership, used for authorizing presence updates.
  - Upgraded JSON library to improve parsing and serialisation speeds.
* Add default avatars to new user accounts using pydenticon library.
* Correctly time out federation requests.
* Retry federation requests against different servers.
* Add support for push notifications and push rules.
* Add alpha versions of proposed new CSv2 APIs, including ``/sync`` API.

Changes in Matrix Angular SDK 0.6.2 (2015-02-12)
================================================
Bug fixes:
 - Fixed a bug which caused OpenWebRTC to occasionally fail.
 - Fixed a bug which caused multiple room initial syncs to occur in rapid
   succession.

Features:
 - Display a "Joining Room" dialog when joining rooms.
 - Display identicons for users with no avatar.
 - Display m.notice events with full formatting.
 - Add push notification rules to settings.

Improvements:
 - Modified the red/blue notification colours to be more noticeable on a wider
   range of displays.
 - Highlight room invitations in blue.
 - Calculate room names for rooms of 3+ members.
 - Improved page load performance.
 

A new release of the iOS SDK and the iOS Matrix Console app is available on GitHub: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk.

If you use CocoaPods to manage your application dependencies, note that the Matrix SDK pod has been updated too.

The changes since the last release are:

🔗SDK

Improvements:

• MXFileStore stores data on a separated thread to avoid blocking the UI thread.
• MXRestClient: Callback blocks in all MXRestClient methods are now optional.
• MXEvent: Cleaned up exposed properties and added a description for each of them.

Features:

• Added API for registering for push notifications.
• Added generic API methods to make any kind of registration or login flow.
• Added Identity server API: lookup3pid, requestEmailValidation, validateEmail and bind3PID.
• Management of event redaction: there is a new method in the SDK to redact an event and the SDK updates its data on redaction event.

Bug fixes:

• SYIOS-5 - Expose registration API
• SYIOS-44 - Credentials persist across logout
• SYIOS-54 - Matrix Console app slightly freezes when receiving a message
• SYIOS-59 - Infinite loop in case of back pagination on new created room
• MXRoom: Fixed [MXRoom sendTextMessage]

🔗Matrix Console

Improvements:

• When long pressing on a message, the app shows the JSON string of the Matrix event.
• On this screen, the user can redact the event - if he has enough power level.
• Use home server media repository facilities to use lower image size for thumbnails and avatars
• Settings screen: show build version with the app version.
• Settings screen: added an option to hide information related to redacted event.
• Settings screen: added an option to enable reading of local phonebook. The country is required to internationalise phone numbers.

Features:

• Push notifications.
• Added a contacts screen that displays Matrix users the user had interactions with and contacts from the device phonebook.
• Contacts from the device phonebook who have an email linked to a Matrix user id are automatically recognised.

Bug fixes:

• SYIOS-53 - multilines text input that expands as you type mutiplines would be nice
• SYIOS-45 - Need to check the thumbnail params requested by iOS
• SYIOS-55 - High resolution avatars create memory pressure
• SYIOS-57 - Back pagination does not work well for self chat
• SYIOS-56 - add cache size handling in settings
• SYIOS-60 - In a self chat, Console takes ages to paginate back even if messages are in cache
• SYIOS-61 - Chat room : cannot scroll to bottom when keyboard is opened whereas the growing textview contains multi-lines text.
• SYIOS-63 - calculate room names for 3+ members if no room name/alias
• SYIOS-44 - Credentials persist across logout
• SYIOS-64 - Chat room : unexpected blank lines are added into history when user types in growing textview
• SYIOS-65 - IOS8 : in case of search in recents, keyboard is not dismisssed when user selects a room.
• SYIOS-16 Add option in Console to join room thanks to its alias

FOSDEM was great fun! Two days full of conferences and demos; lots of interesting technologies and interested people - and most of all: talking to so many new faces about Matrix and potential uses and integration ideas.

Both our lightning talk and IoT-devroom talk were completely filled up with huge queues outside (sorry folks), and our demos seemed to go down fairly well. In fact several people set up their own homeserver and joined the federated network of Matrix servers during FOSDEM itself!

Here's a view from our stand, from our lightning talk and from our IoT-devroom talk.

If you missed the talks, recordings will (soon) be available from the FOSDEM site (links will be added here once available) - in the meantime you can check out the slides here: lightning talk and IoT-devroom talk.

Thanks to everyone who came to have a chat about Matrix and/or help with setting up their own homeserver (or to play with Sentinel, our mascot) - please do reach out to us via our Matrix HQ room or IRC (#matrix on freenode) if you have any problems - or want to help us fix our python packaging ;) Now is a great time to get involved as we are currently landing new APIs and soon will be offering an Application Server API to ease bridging to other services.

This weekend, Matrix is heading to FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) in Brussels, Belgium. We will be hosting two events: a lightning talk on Saturday at 16:30 in room H.2215 (Ferrer), and an IoT devroom talk on Sunday morning at 11:00 in room H.2213.

FOSDEM's schedule is looking very interesting and varied, and we hope we can learn about interesting projects - and of course show how and where Matrix can be used to lots of FOSDEM-attendees. Please come over and have a chat if you are interested; we have a stand on the second floor in the K building - just take a right after coming up the stairs and say hi!

We have also set up a Matrix <-> IRC bridge on the #fosdem channel on freenode, which means that any conversation happening there will be copied over to #fosdem:matrix.org - and vice versa. Making bridges to other services is currently being worked on as part of the Application Services API - we want to be able to connect different services together via Matrix.

Finally, we are always available in the official Matrix HQ room - please join and say hi!

Happy 2015 from everyone at Matrix.org!

We're excited to kick off the new year with a major performance upgrade for Synapse: having had a chance to do some profiling over the Christmas break, Synapse 0.6.1 improves performance by up to an order of magnitude thanks to optimising the way events are constructed and manipulated, DB optimisations, etc. Suddenly things are feeling much more snappy and less of a PoC and more of a real system, which hopefully bodes well for 2015! Please upgrade if you're running a homeserver, or install one if you're not - grab the code from http://github.com/matrix-org/synapse.

The iOS SDK and demo app has also been improving lots in the last few weeks - grab the latest code from http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk. We have zoomable image support; full support for the new media repository in Synapse 0.6.0; file transfer status UI; offline support; snappy message synchronisation and more...

We also released a new simple Python SDK client library for Python called matrix-client, which is now being used by NEB (our general-purpose Matrix helper bot).

Meanwhile, our (constantly evolving) plan for the beginning of 2015 is:

• Finish v2 of the client-server API based on all the lessons learnt since launch: draft in progress here
• Finish the Application Services API to allow proper gateways and services in and out of Matrix at last:draft in progress here
• Re-release the spec based on the above
• Build robust gateways (IRC, XMPP, SIP and more) on top of the AS API
• Polish and release the iOS, Android demo clients - including push notification and VoIP support!
• Overhaul the identity server architecture and add end-to-end crypto

Given the rate at which Matrix is maturing, the next few months should be really exciting - please come join us on #matrix:matrix.org and get involved!

Last week we had a great time attending WebRTC Conference Expo Paris 2014 - chatting to lots of new folks about Matrix; speaking in the "To Build or Not To Build" panel discussion; giving a general presentation on Matrix, and participating in the Demo shoot-out.

And we're very proud to say that we won the Best Innovation Award for a slightly frantic demo, showing an iPad mounted on our pet Trossen Robotics PhantomX Hexapod being used for robot telepresence by streaming video and audio to an Oculus Rift VR headset. This was using our proprietary in-house WebRTC stack, but once Matrix has fully taken off we hope to share our WebRTC stack with the world too :) This was a very last minute demo - we wanted to show something different to normal browser-to-browser IM/Video calling via Matrix and had the idea to use the Rift at the last minute - and in fact it still wasn't working when we went on stage (turns out that iOS 8.1 introduces some quirks in the video capture API which were producing corrupt video). By switching from an iPhone 5S running iOS 8.1 to an iPad running iOS 6 we were able to turn the demo around in the nick of time and get it working live on stage (modulo a RGB<->BGR colourspace bug) just in time to win the award. Huge thanks to the jury for voting for us against the odds :D For those interested in displaying raw video straight onto the Oculus Rift (without using any head-mounted tracking), there's an OpenGL code snippet up at https://gist.github.com/ara4n/875b5e8b66be3617efb7.

(Image credit to Victor Pascual Avila at Quobis)

Also, huge congratulations to Vladimir Beloborodov who won the Best Data Channel Award for hacking his Romotive telepresence robot to rendezvous via Matrix with his iPad, stream video via Google's WebRTC stack and control the robot's motion via the WebRTC Data Channel:

We're really excited to see other folks' Matrix projects out there winning prizes!

We're proud to announce the new 0.6.0 major release of Synapse: the Python reference implementation of Matrix - as well as 0.6.0 of the AngularJS example Matrix client, as a special early Christmas present from the Matrix team :)

The main priority here has been hunting down stability bugs whilst also adding in a few more features. The most exciting new feature is the new Media/Content API: this allows every homeserver to replicate, cache and thumbnail any files associated with Matrix rooms, rather than relying on retrieving them from the origin homeserver as was previously the case. This is really cool, as it effectively makes Matrix a distributed content distribution network and gives the same replication semantics to file attachments as to the rest of JSON in rooms.

We've also landed a major new branch which changes the way events are represented internally in order to make them immutable, and fixes a whole range of minor stability issues. In other news, performance issues are still a work in progress...

To get involved, head over to https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse and install and upgrade today!

We just pushed a bugfix update to Synapse 0.5, mainly to fix a memory leak where federated events could get leaked whilst retrying to send them to a remote server which is unavailable. Please upgrade, especially if you've noticed synapse hogging RAM!