A weekend of intense prototyping and hacking at TADHack-mini Chicago is over, and we were very happy to again see some really interesting projects using Matrix!
Team 'Vivo' - Nestor Bermudez and Arin Sime - used Matrix, Tropo, and Telestax to create an Apple Watch app that notifies your loved ones when you are having a heart attack. Find more information here - and a recording of their presentation here. This project won the Telestax prize.
Charles Solar and Jiang Shuyang used Matrix and Flowroute resources for a platform independent app called 'Samaritan' which allows users to post help requests like "I got a flat tire!" or "My computer crashed!". Others can then call / text / video chat with them to solve their problem. A video of their presentation can be seen here. This hack won the Flowroute prize.
Vladimir Beloborodov demoed his award-winning Matrix-hack from WebRTC Paris: using Matrix just to set up a WebRTC connection between his iPad and robot, thus proving that you can have a robot with telepresence functions without having to depend on a remote server - see his demo here.
Adnan Baleh, Caterina Lazaro, Javier Garcia, Ernesto G. Grabwosky, Sergio Gil and Marion Le Callonnec - Team 'ProbatioNerds' - created a mobile Matrix app to control the provided Trossen Robotics HR-OS1 Humanoid Endoskeleton robot over the Internet - even making it dance the Macarena! Presentation video can be seen here. We awarded team 'ProbatioNerds' the TADHack Matrix prize - an HR-OS1 - and we hope the team and the robot will keep learning new tricks and moves!
[caption id="attachment_1307" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Daniel presenting the HR-OS1 to team 'ProbatioNerds' (Photo courtesy of Alan Quayle)[/caption]
We keep being impressed by the quality of projects developed at TADHacks - remember, in practice you only have around 12 hours to work on your hack. Congrats to all who participated - and thanks to Alan for arranging it!
Heads up that we've just pushed the big red release button on Matrix Console iOS 0.5.3. This includes a bunch of updates to MatrixKit that you can take advantage of in your MatrixKit powered app. These include:
Animated Gif support!
Support for pasting images, videos and documents into the input field
Inclusions of matrix IDs when searching
Options to customise the thumbnail thumbnail display box
You can see the full MatrixKit change list in CHANGES.rst.
Super-quick post just to announce that we have released a new version of the Android Matrix Console. This version fixes a problem where the Playstore wouldn't let some Android devices install the app just because they don't have a SIM card, due to a required permission that wasn't really needed anyway.
Over the past two weeks, we have been hunting down some more performance issues in Synapse, as well as fixing a few potential bugs in the new backfill feature that we introduced in 0.9.1. For those that were having issues, this release should really help speed up when your server joins larger remote rooms.
We have also been busy hacking on end-to-end encryption, which is very exciting. Hopefully we will have more details to share about that soon!
Changes in synapse v0.9.2 (2015-06-12)
======================================
General:
Use ultrajson for json (de)serialisation when a canonical encoding is not required. Ultrajson is significantly faster than simplejson in certain circumstances.
Use connection pools for outgoing HTTP connections.
Process thumbnails on separate threads.
Configuration:
Add option, gzip_responses, to disable HTTP response compression.
Federation:
Improve resilience of backfill by ensuring we fetch any missing auth events.
Improve performance of backfill and joining remote rooms by removing unnecessary computations. This included handling events we had previously handled as well as attempting to compute the current state for outliers.
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!
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!
Daniel presenting the HR-OS1 to team 'ProbatioNerds' (Photo courtesy of Alan Quayle)[/caption]
